There is a fact of life that we just have to accept and there is no way around it. Electronic equipment generate heat and the only way to lengthen the lives of said products is to wick away that heat via fans, liquid cooing, or phase change cooling. Nowhere is heat more on an enemy than in the notebook industry. Granted mobile processors are generally rated at a higher maximum temperature but are supposed to be lower TDP of their desktop counterparts, but the heatsink/fan units on notebooks can barely manage that task and it is not because of the lack of trying, it is because of the lack of space. Simply put and painfully obvious desktops have more space than laptops. With today's markets wanting smaller fast laptops manufactures have to design coolers that are lower profile and therefore may not be as efficient as they "could" be. The other issue is there isn't any airflow around other components such as memory, chipsets, VGA chips, etc. That leads to heat building up inside the laptop with little or now way of escape. So how does one battle this infernal enemy called heat?

One solution is to add an external cooler to the laptop. While this may seem to take away some portability of the laptop, it does not and I will explain. As I am sitting here writing this article (on my laptop) it is plugged into the wall. I have set the power management features in Windows Vista to set a minimum processor speed of 50% and a maximum processor speed of 100%. On battery it's a different story, I have my minimum processor speed set to the same 50% but my maximum processor speed is limited to 70%. This does two things: it helps give my laptop a longer run time and reduces the heat generated by the processor as it's not running at 100% while it is away from the wall. So even with prime 95 running on battery, the AMD Turion TL-58 would only have a maximum speed of 1.5 GHz.

ThermalTake has a few of these coolers in their cooling arsenal and today we take a look at two of them: The NBCool T500 and the Xaser S1000.

 

Since 1999 ThermalTake has been creating market changing products for the computer enthusiast industry. ThermalTake's current line card includes items such as computer cases, CPU coolers, GPU Coolers, water cooling solutions, notebook cooler etc.

"Started from the passion for the DIY (Do It Yourself) concepts and the desires to realize the goal of “Ideas are originated from humanity; Realizing ideas is our belief.” ThermalTake Technology was established in January, 1999 and has been market to the world with “Thermaltake” brand name ever since.

The brand personality of Unique, Aggressive, Vivid, and Stylish makes ThermalTake an expert in creating Exciting things and Fascinating environment for gamers and enthusiasts, also Keep them Constantly High physically and mentally. Excellent technical expertise and integration ability, plus dare to experiment on the new possibilities give ThermalTake the source of authority in the market. Moreover, ThermalTake get close to consumers and observe lead users’ behavior and requirement, to design aesthetic and high quality products which will greatly improve system performance and bring the user to the up most potential. With innovative design and unique style, ThermalTake products spread rapidly among the enthusiasts in DIY market and soon become the number one choice for PC DIY enthusiast worldwide."

Let's take a look at the coolers