There was a time when if you were talking about gaming you were talking about a desktop system. There was no other option really. To get the performance and power you needed you had to have a desktop system. Then a few years ago GPU and CPU manufacturers found a way to put a lot more power into their mobile products and real mobile gaming was born. However, with that came more power draw and more heat. There have been and more than a few solutions to keep these mobile power houses cool, but not all of them have worked. Cooler Master has had a string of these products that have been fairly capable. We have one of these in the lab, a new one, called Cooler Master Notepal Infinite EVO. It is a dual fan aluminum surface cooler with a 4-port USB hub built in. Let’s see what it can do.
Performance - So we have seen that Cooler Master built the Infinite EVO right, but does all of this actually do anything to keep your laptop cool? To test this we ran three runs of the full PCMark 7 suite on our test laptop (a 15.4 Lenovo ThinkPad Edge with a Core i5 CPU 4GB of memory and a typical 500GB drive) sitting on a wooden countertop. After each was done I measured the temperature on the bezel under the screen (just above the keyboard). Then we tested with the laptop just sitting on the Infinite EVO, the final two tests were with the Infinite on low and then on high. We took the mean (the middle) temperature from each of the runs. This is what you see below;
As you can see very plainly the temps were impressive. Even running with the fan off made a big difference in the ability of the laptop to keep cool. I was more than a little surprised to be honest. I will say that the Lenovo is not a high-end gaming system, but it still does show that the Infinite EVO can handle the temperatures. Beside the cooling the Infinite EVO also is angled for comfort. The lower front end is low enough that it does not put a strain on your wrist. The USB ports are also a nice touch. I would not put anything too power hungry in one of them, but it will do for a mouse, keyboard or something like that.
