6. Noise Level Tests

The Acer 1501 lmi ready for testing. Note that this is not the final position of the microphones.

First of all we should say that the preliminary tests confirmed our initial impressions: these pads are pretty useless with well-designed notebooks.

In terms of noise, we found that in some cases, the cooling pads actually reduce the overall noise level of the notebook, because they let the notebook run without setting its internal fans to high speed. This was true of the Ferrari 3400; it runs hotter than the 3200, so its internal fan often spins at high speed. Both cooling pads helped to improve overall comfort, keeping down temperatures and consequently decreasing the overall noise by reducing the speed of the internal fan.

This was not the case with the notebooks from Asus and Sony, both Centrino systems with an integrated graphic subsystem. They run silently most of the time and even at high speed, the internal fan is not very loud. The same applied to the Acer Ferrari 3200 , a high-end desktop replacement.

The Acer Ferrari 3400 on the Coolpad

Finally, we chose a more suitable candidate for these sorts of tests: the "old" Acer 1501 lmi.

While this is indeed a powerful and feature-rich notebook - Athlon 3000+, Ati MR9700, SXGA TFT display - it reaches a peak noise level of 29 dB. This notebook is a perfect example of a loud desktop replacement, since the manufacturer put more attention on raw performance than comfort or noise level.

The two SA-3055 in action

We first tested the pads while looping the 3Dmark 2003 demo at a resolution 1024x768 with no FSAA. We soon realized that with the laptop running at full load for an extended period of time, no pad could prevent the internal cooler from running at high speed. Thus the overall noise was not reduced; on the contrary, it was slightly increased due to the addition of the cooling pad's fans.

However, normal usage patterns mean the notebook does not always run at full load. So we decided to record the sound levels with the notebook internal fan running at low speed using a less performance-intensive application.

As you can see, we have two numbers for the Vantec Lapcool 2 because it is possible to adjust the fan speed manually. When set at minimum speed, the pad is silent, but set at maximum speed it is really noisy. As you can see, at the highest setting, the overall noise level is only slightly lower than that of the Acer 1501 internal fan running at high speed.