The best laptop cooling pad and why you should buy one

an idea Using a laptop cooling pad seems outdated. These days, laptop chips have become very efficient. The fans on MacBooks are barely used (if they exist at all), and Intel and Qualcomm are working to boost efficiency On the Windows interface.

But people keep buying laptop cooling pads, so surely there’s a use case in 2026 that actually makes sense, right? I’ve tried cooling pads paired with them A couple of gaming laptopsand walked away surprised at how effective they were.

Do cooling pads really work?

Photo: Luke Larsen

Laptop cooling pads have been around for decades, and the idea has always been simple: provide extra air to blow through a laptop that’s restricted by its cooling system. In theory, more air means lower temperatures and, ultimately, better performance. That’s the whole idea of ​​power modes in Windows, which increase the RPM (revolutions per minute) of the fans to add more air to improve performance. What’s more, less heat also means a laptop that lasts longer and doesn’t deteriorate as quickly over time. By the same logic, laptop cooling pads offer help.

However, the problem is that a cooling pad is a fairly inefficient way to transfer air to your device. Most laptop cooling pads, including the two I tested, use one large fan or two small fans to blow cool air across the bottom of the laptop. This is the first reason why the vast majority of modern laptops don’t benefit much from a cooling pad, as these laptops tend to only have air vents along the hinge. Without vents or open vents, blowing air through a sheet of metal or plastic will not cool the components on the other side. It will just generate a bunch of fan noise.

Gaming laptops are the main exception, which is why it’s the primary use case for such an accessory. Most gaming laptops have a few open air vents, usually above the fans, e.g Razer Blade 16It is one of the laptops I used to test these cooling pads. Laptops like the Blade 16 are designed for intensive tasks like gaming, video editing, or local AI processing — and they use a high-powered GPU and CPU to get the kind of performance you need. My model has two of the most powerful laptop components on the market: the RTX 5090 and the Ryzen 9 HX 370. As you might imagine, they generate a lot From heat when crank. Modern chips tend to reach their maximum at 100°C, before throttling performance to lower temperatures.

Most laptops use fans to cool these components, but the thickness of a laptop’s chassis is also a determining factor in how much the system will need to throttle performance to keep temperatures down. Ultimately, it’s engineering and physics, and every millimeter of space in a laptop’s chassis has an impact on how cool a laptop can keep its internal components. And unlike larger desktop computers, you have very limited space. This is especially true in the modern era, where even gaming laptops are becoming increasingly thin.