How to cool down your laptop?

First, I need to declare that I am an overheating paranoid person when coming to 3C devices especially laptops and desktops. I switch from laptop to pc 3 years ago and build my own pc. I am not the expert but basically, if you ask me to assemble all the parts and make it boot and work, I can do so.

Today, I am going to talk about heating. I am using pc cooling system as a benchmark and I can accept anything between 32 to 37 degrees Celcius in a room without air-conditioning when the pc is in an ideal stage. Once start gaming, that is very much dependent on the overall cooling system set up. I experienced max temperature to 60 degrees Celcius. Some of you might be laughing at me, but that is my heat tolerance level for a pc. For a custom pc desktop, you can purchase different cooling parts such as a CPU cooler, graphic card cooler and there is even a m.2 SSD cooler silicon pad.

But, for a laptop, there are no such parts available because you can't fit in a CPU cooler nor GPU cooler in the laptop. The most I encounter is twin fan cooling or triple heat pipe CPU cooling.

Why is cooling so important to 3C devices? In simple terms, if the device is overheated, it will reduce the performance of the device and they called it heat-throttling. As much as you can, you want to keep your laptop at an operating temperature that will not create a heat-throttling situation.

There are 2 solutions. The 1st is to send your laptop to service. The technician will clean up the parts, the dust and re-apply a thermal paste. What is a thermal paste? Please read here.

The 2nd solution is to apply heat-conducted silicon paste on top of those parts that generate heat. The mechanism is the same as you apply a cool pad on your forehead when you have a fever. I found a few brands in the market that manufacture thermal pads and I bought the lowest price with 12.8w/MK thermal conductivity with a thickness of 1.0mm. I want to test the effectiveness of this thermal pad. I record the whole process of applying a silicon thermal pad in my personal laptop in this video review. Hope you like it.