Testing

As a testing rig I used my Toshiba Satellite 2805-S201. It is an older laptop with only a 650Mhz Celeron chip. However, this little sucker can get quite hot despite its outdated and under-powered CPU. The 12.8" wide cooler was a perfect fit for my notebook with 14.1" display. Larger screened laptops may hang over the sides a bit though. Now that the notebook is resting comfortably, let's get on with the testing. (Please note that the laptop pictured is an older Gateway model, but is roughly the same size as my Toshiba)


The first test I performed was to assess battery life. Since the cooler was designed to be powered by your laptop's USB, I wanted to see how long the cooler would run using only battery power. The answer was, quite long. The Titan drained almost no life from my fully charged and newly purchased battery. Typically my laptop will run for about 3 hours under normal use (not watching DVDs). With the Titan Fan Pan plugged in, my battery life was not affected at all.


The next series of tests were, of course, cooling based. I taped a thermal probe to the one spot that I know is fond of heating up, the memory bank. I placed the probe over my 128Mb expansion slot and left it there during all tests. I measured the notebook's idle temperature after 2 hours of run-time while it sat on my hardwood floor. In addition, I also took temperature readings as the notebook sat a top the cooler with no fans running and with the fans on at both the lowest and highest settings. For load testing I used SiSoft's Sandra Burn-in benchmarking utility. Each benchmark was run three times and an average of all temperatures taken. The ambient temperature during testing was 21.6°C (71°F).

Notebook Temperatures
(Show All Graphs) (Collapse Graphs)

Idle

Load

No Cooler

Eumax Cooler (Off)

Eumax Cooler (Low)

Eumax Cooler (High)

40.8

40.8

34.6

31.1

0

Temperature ( °C )

60

 

 

Idle

Load

No Cooler

Eumax Cooler (Off)

Eumax Cooler (Low)

Eumax Cooler (High)

51.7

51.5

44.3

42.4

0

Temperature ( °C )

60

 

 

Titan says on its website that the Fan Pad can "reduce the notebook bottom temperature more than 10°C". As you can see from the results, the cooler does what Titan claims it can do. While I didn't note a change of more than 9.7°C, I can't really say that they are lying. Compared to Bytecc's Aluminum Notebook Cooler tested by Kurtis last fall, however, I am not totally impressed. My testing rig didn't attain idle or load temperatures as hot as Kurtis' VAIO. Despite that, the Titan couldn't cool nearly as well as the Bytecc!and the Titan has two additional fans.