Zalman ZM-NC3500 Plus Notebook Cooler Review

For our performance testing we’ve kept things relatively simple, testing the CPU and GPU temperatures of our notebook at idle and load.

The temperatures for our notebook reap results of 5 degrees less. This may not seem like a lot but it can be the difference between notebook overheating and safe operation. It is particularly impressive for our notebook considering the temperatures are normally quite low anyway. One thing that did strike is us that our notebook uses a CPU intake fan near the power jack at the top left of the notebook, whilst the 220mm cooling fan is placed on the centre of the cooler. This means the cooling fan doesn’t blow directly inside the notebook chassis, so cooling is not as effective as it could be on this particular notebook. However, its important to note all notebooks feature different cooling designs and for most the fan intake is closer to the centre than on ours and so would be cooled better.

The GPU shows similar differences in temperatures with the Zalman cooling. As you can see from both scenarios, idle temperatures are generally not affected by the cooler because the dynamic clock speed adjustments and PowerTune technologies of the CPU and GPU kick in when the notebook is idle to reduce thermal output to almost nothing.

Its also worth noting for those people who may enquire about hard drive temperatures that this is irrelevant. Hard drives can safely operate up to 60 degrees maximum and they will never get that hot inside a standard notebook. The use of a notebook cooler will provide some extra airflow to these regions but not enough to provide a dramatic difference due to the way hard drives tend to be sealed off inside the notebook chassis. At best we’ve seen 1 or 2 degrees difference, which is margin of error – the results cannot be consistently replicated in testing.