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What laptop cooler do you recommend for a Thinkpad? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by vis4valentine@lemmy.ml to c/thinkpad@lemmy.ml

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I have a Thinkpad L440 that I use as a daily driver. I was looking for a laptop fan cooler, but I don't know if a fan base that just pours air from below is the most ideal, considering that the hot air comes out of the fan from the left side.

Is there some fan that might attach to the side and helps put cool air in the vent? Does that exist? Does that make sense?

Anyway, If what I say is nonsense, what fan cooler do you recommend for using with my laptop?

It will help a lot of considering that gets a bit hot while gaming, so I play for about one hour or 2, unless the game is pretty low weight like Half Life.

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[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Don't spend any real money on a cooler, especially on a machine like an L440. I got 90% the benefit from just lifting up the laptop 1cm. A cheaper cooler got me maybe 5% more, and the even fancier cooler I bought got maybe 5% better than the shitter one. And that's on a P1 Gen 4 with an i9 and RTX 3080 where half the bottom of the laptop is a vent. My T14 gen 1 saw the same benefit from lifting it, but almost none from the active cooling pads.

Honestly the biggest benefit to the cooling pads is that the rest of the chassis is cooler so my wrist doesn't get quite as sweaty. That part is nice

But what was the biggest difference was swapping the old thermal paste for the Honeywell PTM 7950 phase change thermal "pad". Since my CPU runs so hot all the time the thermal paste dried out/heat pumped out in about 6 months, and by 9 months I was getting almost half the performance.

Also double check your power limits. In windows 10/11 the power plan you select actually controls the PL1 (long term) and PL2 (short term) of the CPU, and the max fan speed. Better battery limits me to 15 watts PL1 and 45 watts PL2. Balanced is 55 PL1 and 109 PL2, and best performance is 109 PL1 and PL2 and higher fan speeds. Haswell was right when power consumption started to get crazy, but hadn't reached full insanity like it is now.