7. A Supercharged Ferrari!

"Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't."

William Shakespeare.

To properly test the heat dissipation capabilities of these pads in critical situations, we really needed a poorly-designed notebook that cranked out a lot of heat. Unfortunately, we did not have one available.

Then a foolish idea came to mind. We noticed that the power plug of the Acer 1521 is similar to that of the Ferrari, but it delivers 2.4 A more current, for a total of 7.1 . We wondered... "what would happen if we 'supercharged' the Ferrari 3400?"

So we did, pushing the notebook's thermal design to the limit. There are two things to keep in mind, however. First, don't try this sort of "torture test" at home. Second, remember that this test is of limited value, since the heat was generated somewhat "artificially", and most of it was concentrated at the back of the notebook.

Don't try this at home.

We loaded the most demanding application around, Half Life 2, and looped a demo. The experiment was successful: after 45 minutes the heat level activated the overheat protection feature, causing an auto-reboot of the notebook.

We tried the same test with the Vantec Lapcool 2, which added just 10 minutes of gameplay. But the Coolermaster Coolpad did an excellent job; we had Gordon Freeman running around for more than two hours before the Ferrari finally had to raise the white flag.

This was a harsh test that had a clear winner: the CM Coolpad. Half Life 2 ran for more than two hours, thanks mainly to the heat dissipation qualities of the Coolpad's aluminum.