A cooler to suit every need?
There seemed to be a resurgence of interest in laptop coolers at COMPUTEX, not least from Gigbyte. The company had three new designs on show.The first, the Roll Pad, is a semi-flexible design, as it's name implies.
Unlike a large number of laptop coolers, Roll Pad is a passive design and allows the typing angle of the laptop to be adjusted by rolling the cooler up or down as required.
Roll Pad should be available soon and in two sizes. The smaller of the two is for notebooks with 12in or 13in screens, the larger is for 14in-15in models.
The second laptop cooler, Tundra, is a huge aluminium slab with a built-in USB hub and card-reader.
Tundra is actively cooled by a 120mm fan and has a fan-filter that can be easily removed for cleaning. It's available in only one size and intended for use with desktop-replacement machines with 17in screens.
Last of the new notebook-cooler trio is the G-Pad Pro, said to be an evolution of the award-winning G-Pad. Improvements include a built-in stow-away foot-stand and a clip-on USB-powered fan.
One of the more unusual showings was the VOLAR cooler
VOLAR has a 45 degree mounting-angle and is designed to provide a conical airflow for cooling the MOSFET's and other power circuitry around the CPU.
The 120mm fan is said to produce a noise level of 23dBA at 2,000rpm or, if the supplied fan-speed-reduction cable is fitted, just 18 dBA at 1,500rpm.
VOLAR is reckoned to support all currently-available LGA775, Socket AM2, 940 and 939 CPUs.
The TALOS CPU cooler has a 92mm fan and a fan-speed-control cable and can be used with the same CPUs as the VOLAR.
A pro-variant - perversely named the TALOS PRO - has a bigger (120mm) fan and two-level fan-speed control. CPU support is as for the standard version.
Gigabyte's V-Power graphics-card cooler supports a wide range of models based on ATi/AMD Radeon X1800, X1900, X1950 and NVIDIA GeForce 6800, 7800 and 7900.
It's equipped with a 90mm fan that can be run at 0-2,000rpm using the supplied variable-speed fan-controller, with noise levels said to be between 0dBA and 25dBA. Also provided in-pack are small heat-sinks for cooling the graphics-card's memory.
Another cooler for graphics cards, CYCLOPS, supports GeForce 6600 (PCIe-only), 7300, 7600, 8500 and 8600, plus Radeon X700, X800 (PCI-e and AGP), X1300, X1600 and X1650.
It carries an 80mm fan said to run at 2,300rpm and produces around 25 dBA.
Neat touches include radial airflow that cools surrounding components and the inclusion of user-installable red and green fan covers.
