Cooler Master Notepal X150 Mini Review ** Updated 09/06/2022

Sonic1506

Bronze Level Poster
Bought this to try out: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07WZQ4896/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

So, here's my mini review after roughly two hours of testing:

Pros:
- Large cooling pad and laptop fits comfortably on the pad but I'd expect it to as the pad can hold up to 17" laptops and I have a 15.6" laptop.
- Pad on the lap feels very comfortable.
- The fan is large and is silent.

Cons:
- With the pad on the lap, the fan is almost pressed up against your lap, so to me, it sort of renders this cooling pad ineffective as there isn't any airflow. With the cooler lifted up, off my legs the flow of air feels much stronger.
- This cooling pad in particular didn't seem to make much of a difference in my tests.

Here's some screenshots taken from Control Centre temperature monitoring.

All the tests were done while my battery was charging, with the cooling pad on my lap and then the laptop itself on top of that. The fan settings in Control Centre are set to Gaming Mode so the fan will be monitored and adjusted automatically by the software within the laptop. The temperatures seem slightly higher than normal due to the battery being charged at the same time.

Control test: Laptop on lap and after about 10 minutes of general use, so browsing internet, doing a bit of work on remote desktop, etc.

CPU was hovering around the 55-57 degree area
GPU was stable at 45 degrees
SSD's were at 34 and 41 degrees

Screen1.png


Running Assetto Corsa downloaded and installed via Steam but running it via my desktop shortcut. Pretty much everything turned up to the maximum and getting about 150fps when looking at the performance overlay. Settings maxxed in the game itself and within Nvidia GeForce Experience.

CPU was hitting 82-83 degrees
GPU was around 66-70 degrees
SSDs were 34 and 41 degrees

Screen2.png


This is without the cooling pad turned on and just the laptop placed on top of the pad and after about 10 minutes of general use, so browsing internet, doing a bit of work on remote desktop, etc.

CPU temps seemed to hover around 56-58 degrees.
GPU was stable at 43 degrees
SSD's were stable at 34 and 39 degrees

Battery-On-Charge-Cooling-Pad-on-Lap-Cooling-Pad-Off.png


This is with the cooling pad turned on and after the same conditions as above:

Processor temps around 60-62 degrees but I did see them fluctuate down to 52 degrees after the laptop fans worked a bit more, so I see this as an erroneous reading really. within a couple of minutes after the fans went back down to 30%, it went back up to 60-62 degrees.
GPU stable at 43 degrees.
SSD's stable at 32 and 37.

Battery-On-Charge-Cooling-Pad-on-Lap-Cooling-Pad-Off.png


The fans seemed to be working harder with the cooler as can be seen in the images. SSD temperatures were lower but CPU temps were higher.

I then did some gaming, running Assetto Corsa downloaded and installed via Steam but running it via my desktop shortcut. Pretty much everything turned up to the maximum and getting about 150fps when looking at the performance overlay. Settings maxxed in the game itself and within Nvidia GeForce Experience.

This below is without the cooler turned on, about 10-15 minutes of gaming and just as I quit out of my race and back to a menu, which is why the GPU usage % is low:

Battery-On-Charge-Cooling-Pad-on-Lap-Cooling-Pad-Off.png


The below is with the same conditions as above but with the cooler turned on:

Battery-On-Charge-Cooling-Pad-on-Lap-Cooling-Pad-Off.png


With these tests in mind, I'll probably be returning this and getting either one of these. The reason is because it looks like the fans are part of the portion of the cooler that lifts up, so it should aid with air flow and cooling:

or
or

Probably going for the latter Kootek. Both come as recommended on other sources and after spending hours researching it seems worth trying and viable options.

I'm not sure if my temperatures when gaming are normal but seems like they may be from reading online. When I did the Unigine and Prime95 tests, the temperatures hovered around 60-70 degrees. From memory, I didn't max out the Unigine tests so this probably explains why the temperatures were lower on these stress tests
 
Last edited:

Sonic1506

Bronze Level Poster
Thread updated as I forgot to add in the control test. The control test was the laptop on my lap in normal use and under gaming conditions.
 
Top