With the advances of processor, graphics and memory technologies pushing their way from the desktop to the notebook and computer user demands on the rise, it seems inevitable that the notebook cooler market is set to heat up. Today we'll look at Antec Notebook Cooler 200 and discover if it can adopt some of the sleek looks of today's notebooks and still deliver efficient near-silent cooling to make it worth your purchase.

200mm Fan

Boasting a huge 200mm Antec Big Boy fan, bigger than any PC fan most computer users will ever see in their experience, the Notebook Cooler 200 - measuring at 13" x 11.2" - is a beautiful beast. From a purely aesthetic aspect the cooler will fit well with almost any notebook available on the market with its black plastic/metal frame and mirrored plates. The unit comes very well packaged against damage during shipping and while unwrapping it you really get a feel of the hefty weight this cooler packs at 1.6 lbs / 0.7 kg. While mostly manufactured from plastic and featuring a mesh metal grill on both top- and under-side of the Antec Big Boy 200mm fan, the cooler structure is very solid and should not cave in from even the heaviest of 17" notebooks available on the market.

While Antec sells the USB cooler as capable on both lap and desktop, this is not something I would want hovering above my lap with a fan happily whizzing away. If you are looking to move your notebook with the cooler attached, be prepared to face a juggling act since the cooler itself does not secure against the laptop so you're almost constantly trying to hold both cooler and notebook together in a fragile state.

If the notebook you're using also comes with a larger battery pack that does not extend across the whole width of your notebook ,you may be in for another act of balance since you'll be trying to align the notebook battery at almost every touch to get the battery pack to actually make even contact on all four of the mirrored contact pads of the notebook cooler, otherwise you'll end up the notebook sliding off the cooler at every keypress.

The cooler comes with a USB Type A connector attached to a lengthy cable to plug into any of the various USB Type A ports available on notebooks and power the Antec Big Boy 200mm fan. Thankfully the cable is integrated into the cooler frame to prevent accidental disconnects and is also long enough to reach nearly any USB port on both 15" and 17" sized notebook.

Here's my HP dv6746ca 15.4" notebook sitting on the USB notebook cooler.

Older notebook owners should however be careful as the Antec draws approximately 400mA current, out of the USB specification available 500mA, from your USB port with the fan set to high speed. This means some older notebooks that don't have the full USB specification required power supply available may only be able to power the cooler in low speed mode or not at all. This should not really be something anyone with a notebook manufactured after the year 2000 should need to worry about.

The back of the unit features two switches to toggle the blue LED's integrated into the fan on or off, which is a welcome addition for those times in the evening when you truly just want your eyes focusing on the monitor to play the latest gaming zombie horror survival game. No software is supplied to manage the Big Boy fan in the OS so the only options that are available for controlling the features of the cooler are via the rear-located switches.

The other switch toggles the Antec Big Boy fan to rotate at either Slow speed (400RPM ± 150) or High speed (600RPM ± 150). Why on earth Antec chose not to supply a higher fan speed setting is something we don't quite understand since at High speed setting the unit draws a maximum of 400mA out of the available 500mA on the USB port. Surely, the additional 100mA could have been used to provide a faster fan speed since most people who would actually go out and buy this USB notebook cooler would be using it on their gaming notebook at either a LAN gaming event or at home.

Regardless of the environment the USB notebook cooler would be used in you can be sure that your integrated notebook cooler is louder than the Antec which has a noise rating of 27.1 dBA at high fan speeds. The difference between the two speed modes is also so minute that Antec would almost have been better to change the slow speed setting to an off setting instead to save notebook battery power when not needed but still allow you to keep the USB connector needed for power plugged in.

The cooler frame is built at a slight incline to allow the average notebook keyboard better typing access; unfortunately the frame is a fixed height and does not feature adjustable feet to change the incline that the notebook has compared to the user. So if you're using a notebook that already has a slight incline when placed on a flat surface, that incline becomes exaggerated to the point that you will need some time to re-familiarize yourself with your new keyboard positioning, or perhaps you may invest on a new keyboard.

A couple of suggestions we've had so far for a potential successor would be a notebook cooler with an embedded USB hub to help relocate USB ports for low-speed/-power USB devices off the notebook and help the cooler serve a secondary function even at the expense of using up 2 USB ports to power the enormous 200mm fan and before-stated USB devices. In it's current incarnation, the Antec notebook cooler control switches do get in the way of general notebook use and frustrate with the control positioning at the back of the cooler. Implementing some sort of latch system to the notebook cooler would also help improve the mobility and inconvenience caused by having the cooler dangling off the bottom of your notebook.

Real-world Tests

All testing conducted with the Antec was done with the Big Boy 200mm fan set to High fan speed since the difference between High and Low fan speed modes is near nonexistent and in a room with an ambient temperature of 23.6 degrees Celsius (°C) / 74.48 degrees Fahrenheit (°F). Notebook component temperatures were monitored using the SpeedFan application.

To test the effectiveness of the Antec, we decided to use the Hewlett Packard Pavilion dv6746ca notebook which features a fairly common AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60 based dual core processor and an entry-level notebook gaming graphics card, the nVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS.

This notebook seemed a natural choice as it has a history of scorching fingers after playing high definition media, playing games like Left 4 Dead or even doing simple things like writing this review. To say this notebook is a fire-hazard is an understatement and makes it somewhat ideal for our testing.

Our first test scenario featured the notebook running in an idle state with no Antec present and doing nothing more than running the basic Operating System (Vista Home Premium 32-bit) shipped with the system.

After running for almost 30 minutes doing nothing the notebook easily attained a tongue scorching score of 60 °C / 140 °F on the central processing unit (CPU) and 64 °C / 147.2 °F on the graphics processing unit (GPU). At these temperatures I'm sure you can already imagine how painful it can be to merely hold your finger on the touchpad for more than a few minutes at a time since the notebook chassis has very poor venting and when the system does kick the fans into action the notebook can easily match a vacuum cleaner in volume.

Running the notebook at full load on both CPU and GPU with Prime95 and nVIDIA's Adrianne Demo running for 30 minutes with no notebook cooler attached reaches a blazing 82 °C / 179.6 °F on the CPU and 75 °C / 167 °F on the GPU. Great for heating up your apartment in the cold winter months, not so great for surfing the internet or playing games on your lap, no matter how cold your apartment might be.

Our second test scenario would have the Antec located below the HP Pavilion dv6746ca notebook running the same test variables as the first test scenario.

Since these are probably the results people are most anxious about I want to point out that the notebook does ship with a 12 cell battery that features a stacked battery pack. This means that the notebook does not sit flush on a flat surface but is slightly raised to accommodate the increased battery pack which in turn causes the notebook to lose effectiveness when utilized with the notebook cooler since the Antec Big Boy fan does not have the opportunity of direct contact to the notebook. The space between notebook and cooler is definitely something readers will want to bear in mind when making a purchasing decision.

At idle the Antec USB Notebook Cooler shaves off nearly 7 °C / 44.6 °F on the CPU and 5 °C / 41 °F on the GPU temperatures compared to the same notebook running without the cooler, overall a very good start. Once we kicked the notebook into full action with both Prime95 and the Adrianna Demo running on our notebook simultaneously, temperatures peaked at at 71 °C / 159.8 °F (CPU) and 68 °C / 154.4 °F (GPU) with the Antec cooler at a high speed setting.

The cooler shows great performance and capability at shifting the hot air out from underneath the notebook and thereby allowing the notebook's own coolers to throttle down. Even though the notebook itself does not rest flush against the Antec and the HP dv6746ca notebook is aligned slightly off center to fit the battery pack on the cooler's surface the efficiency of the 200mm fan is clearly seen in overall lower temperatures for the notebook and better user experience for the notebook user.

Recap

• Great cooling performance
• Very quiet
• USB powered
• Durable construction quality
• Compatible with notebooks up to 17"
• +5 years rated operational life expectancy

• Control switches are on back
• No adjustable height
• Only 2 selectable fan speeds
• Not very portable
• Somewhat expensive

The Antec Notebook Cooler 200 is without a doubt a product that we can recommend, especially when the average consumer is growing more hungry for high performance notebook computing solutions and notebooks are closer than ever to desktops in both performance and pricing. If your notebook is exceedingly hot and you're looking for something to help ail the modern notebook manufacturers lack of design expertise in designing and implementing a proper heat venting solution then Antec has a solution for you. While it may not be easily portable, small or easily hidden, it is near-silent, effective at cooling notebooks and not something we think you'll want to be hiding once you get a breath of fresh air from the Big Boy fan.

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