Targus - Dual Fan Chill Mat Cooling System - Black

Pros: Laptop cooler is quiet, lightweight, durable, and has nice design. It is able to fit 15 inch or smaller laptop nicely. It is composed of black plastic shell. two fans and a plug in usb cable. You can place the laptop cooler on you lap, if you desire. The cooler has four fixed feet that elevate the base by 1/4 of an inch allowing air to flow from the bottom of the cooler through the fans and grill to the bottom of the laptop. There is an ample amount of air flowing from the cooling pad, to cool your laptop, air from the cooler up to the bottom of the laptop's ventalation. The cooling pad air blows upwards. The cooler is small and light enough to travel with L13 1/4" X W 9 1/2".X H 1" It is affordable. I got mine on sale. Cons The usb cable is short at 18 inches. It has no on/off switch and no indicator light. The two fans are fixed. You cannot re postion the fans to align to the vents under the laptop. The fan speed is not adjustable. There is no place to store the cable in the cooler base. There is no storage bag to carry the cooler. Height is not adjustable and unable to change the angle of the cooler.

Worst laptop "cool mat" I've had. Cost $40 but is a flimsy, plastic, dual 12v fans powered via USB at 5v. Tons of air holes on it, fans are not optimally placed, powered @ 5v instead of 12v or a variable & lack of air flow direction, make this a useless air swirler. I can seriously blow more air with my mouth than both those fans. It uses 2 x 80mm "cpu" style fans daisy chained into a USB connector & both fans are roughly equal distance apart on the 12" frame. 12" to support a 15" laptop? Fans located to the bottom & no direction for flow, just plug it in & the fans barely blow a breeze right over top of them only. Laptops do not have very good underside air cooling, hence why we might want something that WORKS. Since I tried to modify the thing to actually do it's job & failed, I can't return it. Total waste of $40. It's "big brother" with the 4 port USB hub is even worse. Stay away from this & the more expensive version of this product.

Having had to obtain on short notice a Windows 10 laptop with optical drive included for some work related video production, I picked up an inexpensive 15.6" laptop to use at the office in the ad hoc video production space I had set up. Since my Toshiba Satellite 15.6" i5 processor Windows 10 laptop did not have an optical drive and I wanted to avoid cluttering up its hard drive with video files, purchasing a second laptop for a specific purpose made sense and space limitations precluded using an external optical drive at the designated space at work. Much to my chagrin, the under $400.00 bargain computer (with an i3 core processor) had both a shorter than expected battery life and it ran hot after two hours of continuous use. Enter the Targus dual fan Chill Mat cooling system. A USB powered hard plastic mat that keeps my laptop cool during video production sessions at the office. There is nothing especially fancy about this product and it is USB 2.0 only. But it keeps one's laptop temperature down and that is what it's supposed to do. This a a no-frills but efficient cooling mat affordably priced. By plugging it into an external USB 2.0 hub I now have a cost effective video workstation where I can transfer video files from the digital camcorder that I use for work to the bargain laptop where I can burn DVDs on an as needed basis for clients.

Well, I dont usually say things are this bad and try to look for something positive to say. I'm positively sure that Targus needs to improve their fans and the USB connection to a laptop. When I put the cord in at first, the fans went on. Good, right? Well, once I put the laptop on the hard top, it stopped. It was intermittently working, like their was a bad connection in the wiring, or the plug didnt fit right in the laptop.. But its not my laptop, it was the cooling system that was at fault. Didnt work from the second I took it out of the clamshell. And it was HARD to get it out of the packaging, so if something happened while I took it out, then they have to fix their packaging. But the product as a whole, was just not worthy of spending the $24 on it. Glad I was able to return it and get a nice cover for my mini ipad. Even better was that it was on sale, and Im really enjoying it. Its also made by Targus, so Targus isnt bad on everything, just these cooling fan systems. Maybe the $50 ones work better? I put my laptop on an icepack and it was probably more effective, but it kinda plugs up the vents on bottom of laptop, so its not a good longtsrm solution. Cmon Targus, make this better so people can have an inexpensive option for cooling down their laptops!

My laptop regularly overheats so when I read the reviews for this product I thought this would really helps lower the temperature. When I bought the product the first thing I noticed was the size. My laptop is 15.5 inches, so when I read that this could fit 16 inches I thought I would be fine. Not so, despite being smaller than the size limit my laptop would overhang the sides by an inch on each edge. Next came the height of the pad. My laptop sits on my desk at a decent height for gaming, but this pad raised it by at least an inch, making it difficult to play games using the WASD keys. The next issue was the amount of cool air being produced, despite having dual fans, they didn't produce enough cool air for it to even feel like a breeze. And despite having holes in the upper side to spread the air, it only continued in the path it was pulled into by the fans. Is this product quiet? Yes Is it cheap? Yes Is it a quality product? No. If you want something for your small laptop to keep it cool on your lap, this is the product for you. If you want something that produces a decent amount of cool air to keep your laptop cooled, I would suggest looking at other products.

Not very impressed by the cheap materials - I feel like this would be way too easy to break or snap in half by accident. It is only $29.99, but I'd still appreciate a sturdier plastic. That said, there aren't a lot of these available it seems, and this does help cool the computer (though it isn't amazing at all). My MacBook still overheats sometimes with this, but it's a little better - doesn't overheat as easily, I have found. It's kinda hard to use this on your lap, but possible if you are very careful. The thing is that it pulls in air from underneath, so I have to prop it so it just rests partly on my leg and leaves room for circulation underneath. Targus does make one meant to sit on your lap, but I've heard the fans are weak. If you just intend to use this on a desk, then it should work fine, and keep your computer from overheating as often.

The fans are a bit noisy and there is definitely some bearing whirring noise too, but I haven't had any issues with it yet. But Its quite obvious that the fans aren't of a very high quality. It's pretty effective at keeping my laptop cool during renders and performances. It even lets my CPU achieve higher clock rates and speeds up things slightly by reducing thermal throttling (I'm talking 3 to 4%, nothing miraculous). It draws less power than an external HDD (but barely less). It only has two fans and they aren't exactly in tornado mode, and many laptops when sitting on top will suppress airflow so you may need to experiment with placement so that they cool the air intakes on bottom instead of blow fruitlessly into the plastic bottom of your machine.

I've been using this cooling pad for almost 2 months? For my UltraThin Acer V5. It's good when I plug it in. But now whenever I disconnect the cooling mat, my laptop depends on it because I can hear my laptop fan roaring to cool down. And yes, since my laptop is UltraThin <1" it will experience heat. My laptop has Intel Core i5 3337U of 1.8GHz up to 2.7GHz Turbo Boost and 8 GB DDR3 Memory. I expected it to cool once I've been using the cooling pad for a while, which it did, but now, it can't cool off by itself. Feels like I'm damaging my USB 3.0 Port Since that's the place I plug it in, next to the laptop fan. I think using an adapter for the cooling pad, may boost it up a bit faster for a desktop feeling if you want to put your laptop there on a desk on top of the cooling pad. But maybe I just need a better laptop since, it heats up a bit too much.