XSReviews

Introduction

Antec are well known for their ground breaking cases and intuitive cooling solutions. XSR recently reviewed the Antec Spot cool, the worlds first fully adjustable mounted fan cooler. Today we will be testing another of their interesting looking products, the Antec Notebook Cooler S.

A little about Antec

The year was 1986. Starbucks had only a few stores. Don Johnson was actually cool. The average PC had less memory than today’s cellphones. And in Fremont, California, a little company named Antec was born. Antec’s first employees never imagined that their upstart firm would rise to the very top of the high-performance computer components industry. But rise it did. And rather swiftly, too.

Antec’s Take on the Notebook Cooler S

NoteBook Cooler S’s small size makes it the perfect traveling companion for your notebook computer. With a built in two speed switch, NoteBook Cooler S lets you choose between maximum cooling or minimum noise. Because of its low power consumption you don’t have to worry about NoteBook Cooler S killing your laptop’s battery while you work. Bring more stability to your notebook computer: pick up the NoteBook Cooler S and beat the heat.

Features

Bits and Box

The Antec Notebook Cooler S has quite eye catching packaging. It is held within a vacuum packed, see through plastic casing. Despite this however, the front of the packaging has little information about the product, simply the name iteself.

The rear of the packaging has some information about the functions that the cooler performs including some specifications about the fans that power the Cooler S.

Also on the back is a small diagram showing how the Cooler S has improved over its older brothers, the Notebook Cooler, and the Notebook Cooler Aero.

The only extra that comes with the Cooler S is the manual which is perfectly fine, though this product hardly needs one.

The Notebook Cooler S

The Notebook Cooler S is made up of two coaxial fans that sit inside a silver and black enclosure designed to pull air in the through the top, and expel it out the front.

The top of the cooler has two rubber pads that are designed to provide padding between your laptop and the cooler to make sure neither surface will get scratched should either move around.

Also along the top of the Cooler S is a nicely embossed Antec logo, just in case you forgot who made it.

The Cooler S has some other nifty features that set it apart from other notebook coolers. One of these is a USB pass-thru which is a great feature that should be encorporated in peripherals more often as it means that a USB slot is not used up by the product.

The coaxial fans are covered by plastic grills, this prevents large items from slipping into the fans and causing them to become damaged or even stop working altogether. These grills will not prevent dust however, so there may be some dust build up over time.

The fans behind this grills draw air in through the “Top”, through the grill and then push the air out of the bottom which forces the air to blow across the laptops underside where there tends to be the most heat build up.

Now we’ve seen what the Cooler looks like and how it works, it’s time to see how it performs. Testing Hohhhh!

Testing

To test the Antec Notebook Cooler S, I used a generic 1.4ghz Celeron M laptop.

The notebook was fully charged and then plugged into the mains for the test.

I ran StressPrime for 30 minutes for each of the load times, then after another 30 minutes I let the laptop run idle for 30 minutes for the idle temperatures.

The laptop cooler was used at high and low for both load and idle, below are the results:

	Idle /C	Load /C
No cooler	50	55
NotebookCooler S – Low	48	55
NotebookCooler S – High	44	54

All the tests were taken in our rather frosty office @ 18C.

As you can see, the results are pretty good on the idle front, though the load temperature difference isn’t quite as spectacular. However, bearing in mind that you would never normally run a laptop at 100% CPU usage unless, the NotebookCooler S does a reasonable job at cooling a hot running laptop.

Noise

At low fan speed setting the cooler can hardly be heard, whilst at high it becomes similar to a loud whisper; far from noisy, or intruding.

Size

As the cooler is quite small and compact, it would be possible to carry this little contraption around with you in a laptop bag and use it whenever you feel the need.

Conclusion

The NotebookCooler S is a nice little product that does exactly what it says on the tin/plastic packaging. The pass-thru USB plug is nice to see, so you don’t lose any valuable notebook connectivity, the low noise output and reasonable cooling make this a product worth some serious thought.

Pros	Cons
Small and compact	Not the best cooling around
Quiet and non-intrusive
Reasonable cooling

I’d like to thank our sponsors Antec for providing us with the cooler.

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