Gaming laptops are not cheap pieces of hardware and can range in price anywhere from as little as $700 to several thousand dollars. Naturally, when we get our hands on a shiny new gaming laptop, we want to look after it, and that means keeping it cool since they tend to run at high temperatures.
A cooling pad is a new tool that is designed to help keep your laptop cool, and if you’ve done any research about cooling your laptop, you’ve likely stumbled across them. But do cooling pads work for gaming laptops, especially considering the amount of processing heat that is created? Let’s find out!
The Need for Cooling Pads
Any laptop’s components will generate heat when the machine is in use, and this fact is doubly true for gaming laptops. Rather than having to worry about the temperatures of just your CPU, you will now have a graphics card that also produces heat.
Heat can cause some pretty major problems to your laptop, including damage to its hardware. In fact, things can get so bad that the plastic casing melts, and one area that is often affected when a laptop overheats is its headphone jack. The plastic around the jack can melt, permanently damaging the port, and if your headphones are plugged in when this happens, they can be damaged as well.
Are Cooling Pads Bad for Laptops?
There are a number of misconceptions about cooling pads that actually have a grain of truth to them. Many people claim that cooling pads are bad for your laptop because they blow dirt and dust into your machine while also blowing hot air onto the laptop.
If you place your laptop on a dusty or dirty surface, it’s going to get dust inside. A cooling pad isn’t going to change this fact. As for blowing hot air onto the laptop? There’s no realistic explanation for where that hot air would come from.
Of course, it is possible for a cooling pad to be bad for your laptop, but that mostly depends on the kind of laptop you have and the kind of pad you use with it. Cooling pads can harm your laptop if they restrict airflow to the machine – lots of R&D goes into the development of a laptop, and a good chunk of that research involves finding out the best layouts for airflow and cooling.
If your cooling pad covers or interferes with the outgoing vents that are meant to provide airflow to your laptop, then you could be in trouble. The majority of modern laptops don’t usually have their vents at the bottom, so this generally won’t be a problem.
Gaming Laptops Overheating While Gaming
When you are gaming, and you feel your laptop getting warmer, it’s generally not because it’s ‘overheating’. Sometimes, when you run many processes at once and have extensive workloads on your laptop, it can overheat, though with the continuous development of modern technology, overheating is much less of a problem.
Video games are very resource-intensive, and the bigger and better the game, the harder your laptop has to work to run it. This is something that you should always keep in mind. Luckily, if you are responsible with your laptop, are making sure that its vents are never blocked, and maybe even if you’re using a good cooling pad, your laptop should always be in a good condition.
The Lifespan of Your Machine
The lifespan of your gaming laptop is going to be largely dependent on how well you maintain it. However, you can expect it to last between 3 to 5 years – if you are looking after it properly, you can extend its lifespan and use it for longer.
However, at a certain point, you are going to have to start replacing components like the thermal compound. Of course, when you are that deep and invested in a laptop, it might be time to start looking for a new one – preferably an upgrade.
You will also need to consider the age of your laptop’s components. If you are playing the latest video games, there’s going to be a point at which your machine stops being able to run new games at their full potential. Outdated hardware is inevitable and is part of the reason why many people convert to PC gaming since it is pretty easy to upgrade and replace parts, provided you have the budget.
Final Thoughts
And there you have it – everything you need to know about whether cooling pads actually work for gaming laptops. The simple answer is yes, they do work for gaming laptops, but that doesn’t mean you should neglect the maintenance and care that should be put into your machine. If you neglect that, there is no cooling pad that can stop your laptop from overheating.