Performance

The most important aspect of cooling pads for notebooks is the ability to draw heat away from the mobile computer. Some companies offer simple fans, which are placed towards the back, under the notebook, while others utilize cloth pads with chemicals to draw out the heat. Zalman is taking a traditional approach and offers passive and active cooling.

We use the Macbook Pro, which features eight sensors. These are quite accurate and can be viewed while any other program is running in OS X. Cinebench is being used to simulate a load on all cores during which the pad heats up and temperatures can be taken. To give the Zalman NC2000 time to raise in temperature, the Cinebench run was repeated five times, to simulate longer use under full load. The measurements were taken without the pad, followed by placing the Macbook Pro on the passive and actively cooled Zalman NC2000.