What happens if we stick a CPU air cooler onto
a gaming laptop? And how does it compare to using liquid cooling?
To find out, I've tested XMG’s Neo 15 gaming laptop with 5 different cooling configurations.
The first is with the bottom panel on and the lid closed, a normal docked laptop scenario.
The next is with the laptop upside down, but with the bottom panel off,
our baseline before adding the air cooler on top.
I’ve also tested with XMG’s Oasis liquid cooler attached, with and without the air
cooler at the same time to see if the air cooler can give us any extra help.
I’m connecting Noctua’s U12S CPU cooler to the laptop with this
USB Type-A to fan pin adapter that I picked up on Amazon.
I’m pretty sure the fan was running at full speed, but even so, Noctua’s 120mm fans don’t
get super loud compared to a gaming laptops fans. There’s no PWM control to adjust speed,
as the adapter only has 2 pins, but it might be possible by instead first
connecting the fan to something like this Noctua fan controller.
This laptop has an extra metal loop on top of the regular heatpipes for its
optional water cooling. To use the air cooler, literally all I’ve done is put
a bit of thermal paste on this pipe and stuck the cooler on top of it.
It’s definitely possible that a different laptop would work better with the air cooler,
as there would be more coverage with the cold plate, but I still found this to work quite well.
We’re almost getting a 500MHz boost to the CPU’s P
cores simply by taking the bottom panel off and turning the laptop upside down,
as this allows more air in by not having the laptop’s fans pressed closely against the table.
If we add on the CPU air cooler we’re able to boost the CPU’s clock speed by another 300MHz
or so, while the GPU goes up 150MHz. Not bad for such a basic, if impractical mod.
Performance was even higher if we instead use the liquid cooler, which makes sense,
this laptop is designed for that and liquid cooling does a better job than air. If we
use both the liquid and air coolers at the same time then we’re able to get a
slightly better result, but it’s super close and not a practical difference.
We’re not able to reach the full 175 watt power limit of the RTX 3080 Ti graphics without any
additional cooling, though simply taking the bottom panel off and flipping the laptop did boost
the GPU by over 20 watts. Sticking on the air cooler was able to remove GPU thermal throttling
and get us to the full 175 watt limit for maximum performance, while also allowing the CPU to use
more power too. Adding the liquid cooler didn’t change the GPU power level as it was already maxed
out, but it was able to boost the CPU’s power by a further 35 watts, while the air plus liquid cooler
combo allowed the CPU to almost use an extra 3 watts, so it is helping, just not by much extra.
Although taking the bottom panel off gave us a 500MHz boost to the CPU and 100MHz to the GPU,
the temperatures were the same with thermal throttling taking place. It’s just that there
was less thermal throttling with the bottom panel off and more air getting in, resulting
in more performance. The CPU was still running at 90 degrees Celsius with the air cooler attached,
however GPU thermal throttling was removed now, which is why the air cooler was able to hit the
175 watt power limit. The CPU temperature doesn’t change at all if we instead use the liquid cooler,
but don’t forget the CPU was also using 35 more watts and clocking a further 500Mhz higher on
liquid. The air cooler is the cherry on top of the liquid cooler, and finally lowered the
CPU slightly under 90 degrees, while also lowering the GPU temp a little extra too,
but not by much. The biggest gains clearly come from liquid cooling.
Compared to the liquid cooler, the air cooler wasn’t really that great,
but compared to just running the laptop by itself, the air cooler was able to help out by a
decent amount and remove GPU thermal throttling, allowing the RTX 3080 Ti to run at full power.
But let’s see how this affects the performance of an actual game.
Simply taking off the bottom panel and letting the laptop breathe was enough to boost average
FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 by 6%. We’re looking at another 6% gain by sticking the air cooler on top,
granted at 1440p that’s less than a 4 FPS difference. We’re barely getting 1
FPS extra if we use the liquid cooler instead of the air cooler, and that’s because the air
cooler was already able to fully remove GPU thermal throttling. The liquid cooler greatly
boosted CPU performance, so a more CPU heavy game or a lower resolution like 1080p may see
a bigger improvement with the liquid cooler than this. The results were basically the
same and within the margin of error range if we use both the air and liquid coolers together.
Cinebench was used to measure raw CPU performance, and there’s a similar 6.5%
boost simply by taking the bottom panel off and flipping the laptop over. The air
cooler barely made a difference here, only increasing the multicore score by a single
percent. The liquid cooler offered a 4% gain over the air cooler, or exactly 800 points,
and then like the game just before, the air and liquid cooler didn’t really make a difference
to performance, however as we saw earlier this combination did lower temps slightly.
The laptop alone goes for 2879 Euro right now from XMG in Germany, while the liquid cooler
costs an extra 199 Euro. I've also got us pricing linked below the video. The air cooler goes for
around 83 Euro, though there are of course much cheaper options that would behave similarly.
From a cost per frame perspective, the air cooler actually ends up the best result,
at least in the one game we looked at. It unlocks the full power of the 3080 Ti for less than half
the cost of the liquid cooler, though of course it is also far less practical, but I don’t have
a graph for “makes sense”. If you’re spending this much money I’d argue it’s worth spending
the extra for liquid cooling, and going water plus air cooler was just a waste of money.
So simply sticking a CPU air cooler onto
your gaming laptop’s heatpipes can improve thermals and performance.
Under normal circumstances, the liquid cooler can significantly reduce fan noise of the laptop,
and I suspect that the air cooler would probably help with that too,
however all my testing here was done with the laptop’s fans maxed out. Because I wanted the
fan speed to be consistent so this would be a fair comparison. Having the laptop’s fans
running at different speeds would introduce an extra variable, but yeah it’s definitely
possible that adding something like this could reduce the overall system volume.
Is this a practical solution that I can recommend? Obviously not. By doing this
you’re making your laptop less portable, which kind of defeats the purpose of having
a laptop. Not to mention that you can’t use the screen, keyboard or touchpad.
If you only use your laptop docked as a desktop replacement, then maybe some sort of tweak like
this could help if you’re really trying to squeeze out every last drop of performance.
For most people though, honestly you’re still going to get a lot of
improvement just by raising the back of the laptop up off of the table,
and you can see how much of a difference this makes compared to a cooling pad in this
video next. I also tested 10 different laptops with 3 different cooling pads,
so it’ll give you a better idea of more realistic ways to improve cooling with your laptop.