The Targus Notebook Chill Mat: How “Cool” is It?

Recently, I was interested in and purchased a Targus Notebook Chill Mat. As a laptop user, I desire to keep my laptop temperature as low as possible. I currently undervolt my laptop processor to reduce its temperature and thought the Targus Notebook Chill Mat might help further lower its temperature, as well as the overall temperature of my laptop. The Targus Notebook Chill Mat contains 2x 1500RPM fans to blow heat at and dissipate heat away from the underside of your laptop. The chill pad operates fairly quietly, with only a slight hum from the fans using power from your laptop’s USB port. After running a series of idling tests, recording the temperature of my processor (CPU), video card (specifically, the GPU), and hard drive, I have found the Targus Notebook Chill Mat is a useful tool for lowering the temperature of a laptop.

For testing, I used my own notebook, an Asus Z7100 notebook with an Intel 2.00Ghz Pentium M processor, 1GB of DDR2 SO-DIMM RAM, a Toshiba 100GB hard drive, and a Nvidia 128MB Geforce Go 6600 video card. For testing software I used the Centrino Notebook Hardware Control (© 2007, by Manfred Jaider) to monitor my processor and hard drive temperatures and RivaTuner (©1998-2007, by Alexey Nicolaychuk) to monitor my video card temperature. For those wondering, thermal paste such as Arctic Silver had not been applied to either the CPU or video card (on the GPU) in my laptop. For these tests the temperatures were measured with the manufacturer’s thermal pads that shipped with the laptop.

For the test, I first established a baseline temperature for my CPU, video card, and hard drive. I booted up my laptop and let it idle on a table for an hour. I disabled internet connectivity to further isolate the laptop. After an hour, I took the temperature readings for my processor, hard drive, and video card.

I then placed my laptop on the Targus Notebook Chill Mat. After ensuring the fans on the chill mat were working, I again let my computer idle for an hour. After this time, I recorded the temperatures of my CPU, hard drive, and video card.

I repeated both tests three times and averaged the data to obtain my results. These are listed below:

CPU Temperature Without Targus Notebook Chill Mat – 39˚C
CPU Temperature With Targus Notebook Chill Mat – 36.3˚C
Hard Drive Temperature Without Targus Notebook Chill Mat – 30˚C
Hard Drive Temperature With Targus Notebook Chill Mat – 26.7˚C
GPU Temperature Without Targus Notebook Chill Mat – 59.78˚C
GPU Temperature With Targus Notebook Chill Mat – 57.66˚C

The results are pleasantly surprising. The Targus Notebook Chill Mat cooled every component by at least 2˚C. Evidently, my hard drive benefitted the most from the Targus Notebook Chill Mat as it experienced an average decrease of 3.3˚C. This is nice as these temperature decreases are easy to obtain. Simply slide the Targus Notebook Chill Mat under your laptop, plug the cable into a USB port, and emjoy. Given the price of CPU’s, hard drives, and video cards, any temperature decrease that helps protect these components from thermal stress and damage is a plus.

Please keep in mind, as every laptop model varies from each other, it is possible you may experience difference results. After all, your laptop hard drive, processor, and video card are likely to be in a different place than mine are. Remember, my laptop processor was already undervolted, meaning the processor was already running at a lower temperature than normal.

In addition, note I did not test the Targus Notebook Chill Mat under a heavy load. The idling tests more or less represent a casual user’s use of a laptop. For those who place heavy stress on your laptop components (i.e. gamers), I expect to see drastically altered results as your laptops will produce much more heat. This heat may reduce the beneficial effect of the Targus Notebook Chill Mat as the extra heat will probably overwhelm the chill mat’s ability to dissipate heat.

In conclusion, the Targus Notebook Chill Mat performs surprisingly well to reduce the temperature of a laptop. Those who desire to cool their laptop to the maximum extent may be pleasantly pleased by this product.