Cooler Master MasterNotePal Maker Review

A Closer Look

The NotePal is quite large, but that’s no surprise given it supports a system of up to 17-inches. What is surprising is how durable and lightweight it feels, thanks to a beautifully finished aluminium top panel.

It’s obviously very well ventilated so not to limit the natural airflow of your system, but more than likely advance it quite a bit. Of course, with the fans of this cooler, performance will be even better still.

At the back, there is a large rubber strip, helping keep your system in place, reduce vibration and prevent scratches.

The unit has a wedge shape to it, which will give your keyboard a light angle that’s more comfortable to type at, while also providing increased breathing room for your system fans.

There’s a thick rubber section on the rear leg of the unit, with thick grooves cut through it that are perfect for holding and routing any cables.

A bunch of firm rubber grips on the base, perfect for stopping it sliding around your desk and prevent it from scratching.

There are multiple levels of height adjustment for the Notepad, not sure who would need it this high, but at least it has got some decent range to it.

Everything you need comes in the box, such as the rubber stoppers, connectivity hub, and the fans. It all looks pretty simple too, so don’t worry if you’re not normally a “some assembly required” type of person.

The fans have peg mounts, with two on one side being on a spring. You lock those in first, push it a little sideways, and it clips right into place.

See nice, and easy. The Good part here is that you can move them as you see fit, as there is no point in having them both in the middle if your systems fans are on the edges, front, back, etc.

The connectivity hub comes with a lovely rubber grommet, which means you could easily use it standalone, or next to your Notepal and it’ll look good.

There are a few USB ports to play around with here, which could come in handy on modern ultrabooks that aren’t exactly brimming with ports.

Pull off the rubber grommet, however, and you can lock the hub right into the back of the NotePal, giving you a neat and tidy desktop expansion.

Next stop, there are two sets of rubber pegs, one deeper than the other, so if you’ve got a slimmer system, they won’t be jutting out at the edges, but either set that you use, they’ll keep your system from slipping away from the cooler.

So what about performance? It’s not a complex beast overall, and we dug out the same laptop we used for a previous notebook cooler review. Normally, this system clocks in at 26c idle and 61c under load using Prime95, which is fairly toasty and it’s certainly noisy at 42-45dBa. The MasterNotePal managed to get those temperatures down by 12C in idle and 15c in load, which is a huge difference, and while you could hear the fans of the NotePal, the system fans didn’t have to do much work, dropping the dBa down to 35! A huge improvement overall and it meant we could run our system at load for longer without it overheating or making a racket.