Tech Olive

Cooler Master is obviously known for their radical cases and cooling products. Personally, Cooler Master is my choice for my PC case fans, but what about laptop cooling pads? Sure, there’s a good market for them, with many choices, but there’s got to be some that stand out from the rest with features or even just reliability and acoustics. Is the Cooler Master Notepal X1 capable of dominating the rest of the market’s offerings? Well, without testing every single notebook cooler ever made, I’m afraid I can’t answer that, but this review is a good start.

The stance of the Notepal X1 is at a great angle, whether you use it on your lap, or on a desk in front of you, the angle makes it a bit easier to type and makes typing that much easier on your wrists. By design, laptop cooling pads are simple. As such, it is a bit hard to go into detail about one because just about everyone knows that it is a mesh platform with one or more fans mounted within it, pointed up to blow cool air onto the bottom of the laptop you have sitting above it. This does not mean that they are all equal, however. The Notepal X1 has a small handful of great ideas put into fantastic execution.

As one would expect, the Notepal X1 draws its needed power from one of your laptop’s free USB ports. This can become problematic because laptops often have a very limited number of USB ports. What Cooler Master did to avoid this was add a USB 2.0 port to the cooler itself to remedy the usage of the original USB port. So, a port on your laptop may be taken up by the cooler, but the cooler offers a replacement data transfer port so that you retain the same amount of available USB ports at all times. On top of that, the Notepal X1 has not only a single 120mm fan (which run much quieter than most smaller fans), there is also an RPM-modifying dial, allowing you to speed up and slow down the fan as you see fit. I much prefer this over a cooling pad that modifies the speed automatically or one that has no speed choices whatsoever.

Really, as far as notebook coolers go, you’d be hard pressed to find one that is much different from another cooler. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it just makes it a hard thing to thoroughly review. As a cooler, the Notepal X1 serves its purpose, cooling down our test laptop by several degrees. I’ll be honest, I haven’t used many notebook coolers in my day, but as far as cooling and features go, the Notepal X1 seems to have all the bases covered, all topped off with great cooling performance and it’s not bad to look at either.

Scores

- Price: 7
The Notepal X1′s price is a bit more than I would consider spending on a cooler, but the price is just right about average for coolers and has plenty of features.

- Setup/Install: 10
Setup couldn’t be simpler. Plug it in, press the power button, adjust the speed dial and that’s it.

- Ease of Use: 9
Much like the general setup, using the Notepal X1 is a breeze (no pun intended). Plug it in, press the button, turn the dial.

- Performance: 8
Although it could have cooled a little more efficiently, it performs admirably for only having a single 120mm fan. The extra USB port is USB 2.0, so it transfers as fast as you’d expect.

- Features: 9
I was surprised to find the attention to detail that Cooler Master put into the Notepal X1. It has just about everything I would expect or want out of a cooler.

Overall: 9 Olives