Customer Ratings & Reviews

The Razer Laptop Cooling Pad with [un]Intelligent Fan Control is capable of decent cooling but has some significant design flaws. [ The Good ] This cooling pad uses a single large fan that moves air upwards toward the bottom of the laptop. Laptops that can most benefit from this have bottom ventilation and inadequate thermal design that can regularly result in thermal throttling. The best results I measured were from a gaming laptop with bad thermal design that normally results in CPU throttling within a couple of seconds of only 50% CPU usage. When on this cooling pad, that laptop regularly received a 15 C reduction in CPU temperatures pre-throttling (compared to just sitting on risers) with the default ‘Balanced’ ‘Smart Fan Curve’ profile. This is quite significant. Results were less dramatic on other gaming laptops with proper thermal design. When connected to the laptop via USB and using Razer’s Synapse software, the [un]intelligent fan control can change the fan speed relative to CPU/GPU temperatures. It can also turn the pad off/on automatically when the laptop turns off/on. [ The Bad ] The ‘Smart Fan Curves’ implemented in the Synapse software are horribly designed. The primary issue is that the software does not interpolate values between nodes on the fan curve graph. If the current temperature falls anywhere between two nodes on the graph, then the speed of the node to the right of the current temperature on the graph is selected for the fan. This issue is compounded by default fan curve profiles that do not properly take the lack of interpolation into consideration. Take for example the default graph of the ‘Balanced’ profile, which contains three nodes on the graph: [31.3% speed @ 40C], [68.8% speed @ 90C], [68.8% at 100C]. The second node is entirely redundant; it can be removed with zero effect. With only two meaningful nodes, one on the very left and one on the very right of the graph, this profile effectively has a fixed fan speed of 68.8% (2,200 RPM, as currently the max RPM is set to 3200 in the software, for a CPU temperature anywhere between 40 and 100 C). This is absolutely ridiculous for a ‘smart’ fan curve. The ‘Performance’ profile is only slightly better with a single fan speed occupying 75% of the graph and a second speed occupying the other quarter (and also featuring a completely redundant node that has zero effect). Now you can–and definitely should–create custom fan curves to help alleviate this nonsense, but the lack of interpolation can still result in unintuitive behavior. For example, the default fan curve of the ‘Balanced’ profile visually lies entirely below the default fan curve of the ‘Performance’ profile–except for a shared starting node on the left–but because of how the nodes are placed, any temperature between 40 and 55 C, which spans a quarter of the graphs, will have the fan spinning faster in the Balanced profile than in the Performance profile. That may sound like a logical impossibility, but I assure you in this case it is not. Adding insult to injury, I’ve confirmed with a Razer representative that this is all intended design/behavior and *not* the result of a bug or malfunction. The fan gets obnoxiously loud well before reaching its top speed. The control buttons on the side of the cooling pad are sharply angled downward making them difficult or impossible to see in most practical conditions. Tilting the pad to see the buttons isn’t much help, as the ‘labels’ of the buttons are completely uncolored but merely etched/recessed, making them difficult or impossible to read in a wide range of lighting conditions. Does not have adjustable angle/height. Uses an inconsiderately designed, space-hogging ‘wall-wart’ AC adapter. [ Conclusion ] The Razer Laptop Cooling Pad is capable of providing significant air cooling to a laptop. Unfortunately, the lack of interpolation by the Synapse software results in unintuitive behavior that I think the vast majority of users would not expect, even among power users inclined to define their own fan curves. The default profiles do not adequately take this design into account, resulting in poor adaptation of fan speed relative to CPU/GPU temperatures. Because this inexcusably bad fan control behavior is so central to the operation of this product, I cannot recommend it to others.

Very nice stand for my laptop, It provides with very strong power of fans and keeps everything nice and cool. Also the noise isn't that loud either once the laptop is on the stand recommend for sure