Testing & Results

Testing Methodology

During the test procedure temperatures were monitored by CPUID Hardware Monitor 1.16. No specific stress test programs were used to raise temperatures as the laptop gets hot enough on its own, instead I decided upon running a popular MMORPG (Fly For Fun) to raise temperatures. For the first test the game was loaded and once the laptop was sufficiently warmed up the game was turned off and it was allowed to cool without any assistance to give a reference temperature, then the laptop was cooled with the Zalman ZM-NC3000U cooler on it's lowest fan speed setting until temperatures stabilized and finally cooled further by the Zalman ZM-NC3000U on it's highest fan speed setting. Tests were replicated three times for accuracy and an average result is represented in the first graph below.

For the second test the temperatures were taken while the laptop was in use (load temperatures). Once again the laptop was warmed up by running Fly For Fun and temperatures were taken under the following conditions 1) Laptop under load with no cooler, 2) Laptop under load with ZM-NC3000U cooling with fan on it's lowest speed setting, 3) Laptop under load with ZM-NC3000U cooling with fan on its highest speed setting. Tests were replicated three times for accuracy and an average result is represented in the second graph below.

We have also Included the results from the previously tested Zalman ZM-NC2500Plus notebook cooler for comparison purposes.

Test System

• Laptop Model:Compaq Presario CQ61-110SA
• System Memory: 3Gb PC2-6400
• Processor:Pentium Dual Core T4200 @ 2.0Ghz
• Disk Drive: WD Scorpio Blue 160 GB SATA
• Operating System: Windows Vista Basic

Results

During the test procedure the ambient room temperature was monitored and was between 27C and 28C for the entire duration of the tests. The temperatures in the graphs below are in degrees Celsius and represent the cooling capabilities of the Zalman ZM-NC3000U notebook cooler.

As you can see this particular laptop does get pretty hot while in use, after a session of gaming it was allowed to idle and the temperatures were monitored. The laptops internal cooling leaves a lot to be desired, the three temperature sensors on the CPU, Motherboard and HDD respectively were hovering at 56C ~ 57C. The Zalman ZM-NC3000U was Able to drop those temperatures quite considerably, knocking 22C off the CPU temperature, 15C off the Motherboard temperature and 13C off the HDD temperature. As was noticed before with the ZM-NC2500Plus, not much difference was seen between the high and low fan speed settings

In the second test the results are noticeably different, there is a clear difference between the results for high and low speed fan settings, and a definite improvement was seen with the use of the Zalman ZM-NC3000U notebook cooler. Temperatures were reduced by 12C on the CPU, 12C on the motherboard and 11C on the HDD, a nice even all round performance thanks to the location of the fan.

The Zalman ZM-NC3000U notebook cooler was able to reduce temperatures evenly across the range and has a slight edge 2 - 3 Degrees Celcius over its younger brother - the ZM-NC2500Plus, which wasn't able to cool the HDD as well as the other laptop components due to its rear intake design. The ZM-NC3000U is the clear winner here as its was not only able to cool more, but it was able to cool evenly too.

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