Razer has just unveiled the imaginatively-named Laptop Cooling Pad, which is a laptop stand that the company claims can boost your laptop’s performance. It may sound like an RGB-smothered gimmick of epic proportions, but we just got hands on with it and can vouch for it actually working.
While the best gaming laptops of the world should have enough built-in cooling capacity to maximise their gaming performance, the simple fact of the matter is that they often don’t, and even when they do, just resting your laptop on certain surfaces can dramatically affect how well that cooling works. Any sort of laptop stand can help to maximise your laptop’s cooling potential, but the Razer Laptop Cooling Pad in conjunction with its Razer Hyperboost feature takes things a step further.
Razer first unveiled the Laptop Cooling Pad a few months ago, and the idea behind it is that it houses a large 140mm fan that can force air up and through your laptop, boosting its cooling and in turn allowing its CPU and GPU to maintain peak clock speeds for longer for more performance. Because the fan is so much larger than those in your laptop, it can spin much slower and quieter for the same amount of air throughput, or for peak performance it can just blast through so much more air.
We got to see just how well this works first hand at the Razer booth at the CES trade show that’s taking place this week. With one of the company’s Razer Blade laptops – sadly not the new RTX 5090-equipped Razer Blade 16 – sat atop the cooling pad, we observed the frame rate in Shadow of the Tomb Raider improve from 159fps to 175fps average thanks to the the added cooling.
There are two caveats to this impressive result, though. The first is that we saw this particularly decent boost using a Razer laptop that was also running the company’s Hyperboost feature. This is a new software update available to all recent Razer Blade laptops that has them recognise they’re using the cooling pad and actively apply peak boost frequencies to the laptop’s CPU and GPU.
Without this software feature specifically pushing the CPU and GPU to their limits, there’s no guarantee your laptop’s CPU and GPU will actually clock any higher with the addition of extra cooling. There’s a good possibility, but not a guarantee.
The other factor is noise. While the cooling pad can help to keep your gaming laptop running cooler and quieter than it otherwise would, if you engage Hyperboost and look to get peak performance, the laptop and cooling pad’s fans will run fast and loud.
Still, it’s great to have the option of switching between cool, quiet running and peak performance mode, especially if you have a quality gaming headset with noise cancelling. A set such as the Razer Barracuda Pro or the Alienware Pro Wireless has you covered on that front.
For more from the CES show floor, check out our CES news hub, including a look at many of the new AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics cards and Asus’ scary new gaming router.