Looking to cool down your laptop? How much can a large cooling pad help improve thermals?
In this video I’m checking out the Thermaltake Massive 20 RGB cooler, and I’ll cover laptop
CPU and GPU thermals at different fan speeds and height settings to show you how it can
help improve the performance of your laptop.
Just before we get into the review, I wanted to remind you guys that I’m currently running
a giveaway with Kong Computers for this cooling pad, as well as the Razer BlackWidow X keyboard.
The giveaway is still open for a few more days and open to anyone in Australia, check
the link in the description to enter.
Alright, so this cooling pad is quite large, and on top it’s got a metal mesh with the
Thermaltake logo up the back. Perhaps most importantly it’s also got RGB lighting around
the edge which should keep our laptop even cooler compared to not having it. Don’t
worry, you can turn the lighting off if that’s not your thing, but they also sell cheaper
models without the lighting too.
It’s so large because it’s got a 200mm fan in the center and the cooling pad supports
laptops up to 19 inches. I’ve got the fairly large 17 inch Aorus X7 here and it fits with
room to spare. Toward the front there are some rubber pads which prevent the laptop
from sliding off when it’s on an angle.
Underneath there’s nothing going on, just the fan intake in the center as well as some
rubber feet. The rubber feet did an acceptable job at keeping it in place, however there
are two extendable feet towards the back to raise it up further.
This angle may aid in typing and also improves airflow, but I’ll check that later in the
temperature testing. The feet can be extended twice, giving you three different heights
to use. By default it’s on a 3 degree angle, and this can be extended to 9 and 13 degrees,
and I’ll refer to these as levels 1, 2, and 3 respectively from now on. With the feet
extended at any level though, the bottom of them are hard plastic, so it’s much easier
for the back of the cooling pad to move around, although I did find this a little more difficult
once you’ve actually got the weight of a laptop sitting on it.
On the back from left to right there’s the fan speed adjustment dial, buttons for cycling
through the 5 lighting effects and changing between 7 different colours, as well as the
power input.
The fan speed dial can be turned all the way to one side to completely turn the fan off,
or turn it on and adjust the speed from low to high, and I’ll be including temperatures
with the fan at different speeds later. The fan is listed as running between 600 to 800
RPM speeds, so there’s not really much difference between minimum and maximum speeds, here’s
how it sounds at the different levels to give you an idea.
The Aorus X7 was at idle during this test so we’re mostly hearing the fan from the
cooling pad. There’s not much of a difference between running the fan at low or maximum
speeds, the difference will be even less noticeable when you include laptop fan noise anyway.
The first button which cycles through the 5 lighting effects allows you to change between
wave, RGB spectrum, pulse, blink and just a solid colour. Some of the effects like pulsing
or the solid colour can be changed between 7 colours using the next button, including
red, yellow, green, light blue, dark blue, white and purple.
Finally there’s the power input, you connect the included cable to the cooling pad which
has two USB Type-A ports that you plug into your laptop. The cooling pad requires 1.2
amps to activate, so depending on the USB port of your laptop you may be able to use
one port, or both may be required. While I get that it’s good to be able to plug into
your laptop and power it, I feel like a cooling pad this size isn’t exactly portable, so
it may have made more sense to also have a power adapter that you could instead plug
into the wall, rather than potentially taking up two whole USB slots, which is a fair amount
for a laptop when you’re essentially using it while docked, so you’ll probably want
to attach things to it using the USB ports.
So how does the cooling pad actually perform? I’ve tested using the 17 inch Aorus X7 with
i7-8850H CPU and Nvidia GTX 1080 graphics, so quite a powerful and hot machine. Testing
was completed with an ambient room temperature of 25 degrees celsius, and the laptop was
running Aida64 and the Heaven benchmark at the same time to try and utilize both the
CPU and GPU together in a combined load.
I’ve got the X7 set to 80% fan speed, so not quite max but still pretty loud. We can
see here that the CPU temperature was always 90 degrees celsius in this test, it was always
thermal throttling regardless of what I did with the cooling pad. We’ll see in the next
graph how performance was improved though, just because it’s constantly thermal throttling
doesn’t mean we’re not getting improvements. We’re seeing improvements to the GPU temperature,
as that wasn’t thermal throttling we’re able to drop the temperature from 89 degrees
Celsius without the cooler by 7 degrees to 82 with the fan maxed out and legs fully extended.
Here are the average clock speeds for the same tests just shown. As the GPU wasn’t
thermal throttling we’re not really seeing a difference here, but there does appear to
be an extremely small improvement as GPU boost works better under cooler temperatures. What’s
more interesting is we’re seeing an improvement to CPU clock speeds as we raise the feet of
the cooler up and increase the fan speed, though not by much. The difference between
the laptop only and then best case with the cooling pad at maximum height and maximum
fans is only 200MHz across all cores, but this is kind of a worst case with the 6 core
8850H under full load combined with GPU load. If there was no thermal throttling we’d
probably see similar temperature improvements like we did with the graphics.
For up to date pricing check the link in the description, at the time of recording this
cooling pad is around $40 USD, though others seem to be less than that, so it really seems
like you’re paying for the larger size and of course that RGB lighting. Compared to the
price of your beastly gaming laptop, that seems fine for the small boost in performance
you’ll be looking at.
While there is certainly an excessive amount of RGB lighting in products these days, overall
I personally liked the design of the cooling pad. As we saw in the thermal testing it does
make an improvement, but it’s nothing exceptionally crazy. Performance can be boosted, but the
results will vary between laptop. All it’s doing is blowing air up and increasing the
space between the bottom of the laptop and the desk, so if you’ve got a laptop with
no air vents on the bottom like a MacBook or the ASUS Zephyrus M for example you’ll
probably see less of an improvement as the internal components won’t get that air flow.
The only issue I had was the potential requirement to take up two whole USB Type-A ports, granted
many may be fine with just one port like I was here, I think this type of cooling pad
is less portable and more of a stationary object, so it may have made more sense to
have a power adapter to plug into the wall instead.
Let me know what you guys thought about the Thermaltake Massive 20 RGB cooling pad down
in the comments, don’t forget to enter the giveaway linked in the description if you’re
in Australia, and of course subscribe for future tech videos like this one.