Zalman NC2000 Notebook Cooler
Feature
We got our hands on their top of the line model for notebooks, the ZM-NC2000. In the following, we’ll take a look at it, and of course find out just how much cooler it really keeps your laptop.
In the end, looks aren’t the most important part about a laptop cooler, its effects on temperatures are. To determine the effectiveness of the NC2000, we stress-tested it under gaming and office conditions. For testing purposes, we got our hands on one of the most powerful gaming notebooks in the world, the Alienware m15x. This 15.4” machine (in our setup) boasts a 2.5Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, a 160Gb hard drive, 4Gb RAM, and the mighty Geforce 8800M-GTX graphics card with 512Mb of VRAM. We placed the laptop on the cooler, hooked it up over USB, and attached various peripherals to simulate real-life gaming situations, including a mouse, an external hard drive, and a headset.
To monitor temperatures, we used CPUID’s Hardware Monitor (http://www.cpuid.com/hwmonitor.php) for primary temperature measuring, as well as RivaTuner (http://www.guru3d.com/index.php?page=rivatuner) to graph GPU temperatures. The m15x boasts five different thermometers: one for each CPU core, one for the GPU, one for the HDD, as well as a general system thermometer.
Office work
Our first test was under “office work” conditions, that is, Word/Excel, music and internet. With the NC2000 off, HWMonitor gave us these maximum temperatures:
System Thermometer: 53°C
CPU Core0: 46°C
CPU Core1 : 44°C
Graphics Card : 46°C
Hard Drive: 38°C
We then repeated the test under the same conditions, for the same period of time. However, this time, we turned the NC2000 on and set it to full blast.
Test: Office Work, Cooler ON
System Thermometer: 48°C
CPU Core0: 40°C
CPU Core1 : 39°C
Graphics Card : 46°C
Hard Drive: 35°C
As we can see from the numbers above, the NC2000 does an admirable job at bringing down all temperatures (except the GPU) by 3-6°C, a number not to be scoffed at.
Gaming
However, most buyers of notebook coolers are avid gamers, and probably more interested in cooling performance under extreme conditions. The setup was the same as before, except that this time, we played through a few missions of EA’s Crysis. To get a bit of variety into the setup, we chose two wildly different missions, namely Onslaught, a wide, ranging outdoor mission, as well as Reckoning, the final, indoor mission that includes lots of explosions and other graphics-intensive effects. As before, we first ran the tests with the cooler off.
Test: Crysis-Onslaught, Cooler OFF
System Thermometer: 74°C
CPU Core0: 68°C
CPU Core1 : 67°C
Graphics Card: 88°C
Hard Drive: 53°C
Test: Crysis-Reckoning, Cooler OFF
System Thermometer: 72°C
CPU Core0: 65°C
CPU Core1 : 67°C
Graphics Card: 89°C
Hard Drive: 51°C