With the weather set to hit over 86°F (30°C) this week in many places on either side of the Atlantic, it’s not hard to see how a cooling pad might be a literal lifesaver for your laptop. Helping its internal cooling system keep its core components frosty, they’re incredibly helpful during demanding gaming sessions – and absolutely invaluable during heatwaves when the mercury in your thermometer is a few degrees off boiling.
Your laptop always generates some heat when running, but it’s when you’re starting to push its limits that it’s most likely to become a problem. The harder you’re working its core components, the warmer they will get, until they start to outstrip your laptop’s built-in cooling capacity – and you’ll hit this point much faster if ambient temperatures are much higher. With its powerful fans, a cooling pad can improve how rapidly your laptop can dissipate heat and massively reduce the stress this places on its components.
As TechRadar’s reviews editor, I not only developed our testing process for the best laptop cooling pads, but I’ve also tested many of them firsthand. That’s given me unparalleled insight into which products you can most depend on to help your portable gaming rig or creative powerhouse beat the heat. So there’s a handful of products I’d happily recommend if you’re wanting to keep your laptop chill even during the hottest days of the year.
1. Llano RGB Laptop Cooling Pad
In my book, the Llano RGB Cooling Pad is flat-out the leading light among laptop cooling pads. Rather than aggressive gamer styling, it offers smooth curves and a subtle RGB light bar around its middle. Meanwhile, the design is comfortable to use, offering plenty of room to rest your wrists while holding your laptop at a comfortable, ergonomic angle.
More importantly, it blasts out air like Louis Armstrong trying to blow out trick candles during a trumpet solo. While conducting a 15-minute 3DMark stress test on our Acer Predator Helios gaming laptop, I set the Llano to max fan speed and measured how much the laptop’s temperature rose over 15 minutes. Thanks to the Llano’s dizzying 2800rpm top fan speed, it rose just 14.4°F (8°C), easily the most modest heating I’ve ever seen from a cooling pad I’ve tested.
Naturally, there’s a price to be paid for this arctic cooling. First off, a fan spinning that fast is inevitably on the loud side, hitting 79dB when measured with a sound level meter at close range – that’s nearing the volume of a small blender. And secondly, it’ll cost you: at $119.99 / £129.99 (around AU$190), it’s hardly the cheapest pad on the market. However, if you want the absolute best cooling you’re likely to experience, the din and the extra dough are well worth it.
Read my full Llano RGB Laptop Cooling Pad review.
2. Liangstar Laptop Cooling Pad
If you’re not quite ready to drop over $100 / £100 to turn your laptop into an ice cream bar, I’d argue the Liangstar Laptop Cooling Pad is going to be your best alternative. Assuming you can look beneath the surface of its edgy design, there’s a lot of the cut-glass angles you tend to see with gaming accessories, and Liangstar has inexplicably given it a tribal lower-back tattoo – it’s actually an impressive piece of kit.
Running it through our standard cooling test, the Liangstar only saw the peak temperature of TechRadar’s laptop rise 28.4°F (15.3°C) – while that’s a decent amount more than the Llano RGB Laptop Cooling Pad, it’s better than pretty much any other budget cooling pad I’ve tested so far and much better than the 57.4°F (31.9°C) the laptop heated unaided. It’s also not significantly louder than its rivals and much quieter than the Llano above, measuring a more muted 59dB from a few inches away.
You’d think such robust performance would attract a more demanding price tag. However, Liangstar’s cost is seriously competitive. The blue-lit edition I tested retails for just $19.99 / £20.99 / AU$66.91, which is an enormous saving when compared to Llano’s pads. Fundamentally, if you’re not looking to make an enormous investment, I cannot fault the Liangstar Laptop Cooling Pad – it offers a whole lot of cooling for your cash.
Read my full Liangstar Laptop Cooling Pad review.
3. Llano V10 Gaming Laptop Cooling Pad
It’s easy to see why the Llano V10 Gaming Laptop Cooling Pad gets a full-throated recommendation from me. During my benchmarking tests, it performed admirably, with our testing laptop only registering 21.6°F (12°C) of warming after the 15-minute stress test – the second-best result I’ve found so far. While it’s hardly the quietest fan on the market, at 69dB it is at least quieter than the Llano RGB Laptop Cooling pad, putting it more in line with highway traffic than heavy equipment.
Llano has deployed a similarly understated design here as with its stablemate above. Rather than all the severe angles, flashing lights, and paint splatters that some gaming hardware exhibits, the V10 instead offers restrained curves and a tasteful light band along the edges. Its feet only offer one height setting, which props your laptop up at 10 degrees, but I found this comfortable to lean on for lengthy periods of time.
The only real drawbacks to the Llano V10 are two things I’ve already mentioned: the Llano RGB Laptop Cooling Pad and the Liangstar Laptop Cooling Pad. With the former offering such fantastic cooling and the latter such good value, the V10 is squeezed on both sides by attractive options, slightly diminishing its utility in comparison. Still, if you can’t quite stretch to the full price of the Llano RGB Laptop Cooling Pad, this will give you access to silver-level refrigeration that the Liangstar can’t quite reach.
Read my full Llano V10 Gaming Laptop Cooling Pad review.