https://www.electrostingz.com/2025/02/laptop-cooling-pads-do-they-work/
My basic cooling pad experiment which is not under a very demanding load and I'm using adjusted CPU boost settings so that the difference can be seen. I should explain this further, if the CPU is under an extreme load or the boost clock is 5.8/5.7 with the Vcore around 1.45 the CPU will always be over 90+ regardless of fan control. This is due to how the temperature is calculated and the actual cause of the heat source, sometimes it's not because the CPU is generating heat as a result of work but it's generating the heat as a result of consuming more power.
That may not make sense yet until you consider this.
A single CPU Core is at 3.0GHz processing some calculations, runs 75 Deg C @1.1v.
Same CPU, same task but it boosts the core to 5.0GHz, now runs 95 Deg C @1.45v.
Did the workload cause the temp increase or the fact that the CPU overclocked (boost) itself?
So Under this condition the cooling impact is minimal as the CPU Boost is trying to maximise core performance and will boost as much as possible within it's thermal range. If it deems anything under 95 being fine then you will always hit this limit if the conditions permit. This is how the CPU operates and in theory if your cooling maintained the CPU at a constant 60 Deg C and there were no power limitations, all the cores would boost to the max when under load.
So back to reality, in a gaming environment all your P-cores are working but not under a constant load depending on what the game is doing so 2 cores might be 5.7GHz, then downclock, another core might go 5.8GHz then downclock, all cores might go to 5.2GHz then downclock... it's pretty much all over the place depending on what happens in the game, a good example is when you hit a very high activity area with visual effects, physics, particles, smoke, you will often hear the fans spin up, see a spike in core temps, decrease in boost clock frequency... and the cycle begins. The point here is the CPU boost is partially responsible for the high temperature you see.
The cooling pad will help manage temperatures as the fans will have more airflow and work better but the design limitation is the heatsink (heat exchange rate) / internal fan RPM. MAX RPM on the cooling pad, MAX RPM in the laptop and maybe -10 is achievable, the other areas under the laptop will benefit more.
Check my other blog posts as if you really want to lower temperatures you should play around with the boost clocks and Vcore offset, using INTEL XTU SOFTWARE. https://www.electrostingz.com/intel-i9-14900hx-lower-temperature-tweaks/
