Water cooling laptop pad: madness or innovation?

If you’re into PCs you sure have heard of water cooling units that offer better performance compared to air cooling heatsinks, but are harder to mount, present the danger of water leaking on the components and are more expensive. Nonetheless, watercooling is a nice thing to have if you can afford it. Someone (SonData) though of bringing this concept to laptop cooling stands and even made a working product called F11124-ASL-1.

Yeap, you heard that right: a watercooler pad for laptops. Why I think this is madness? Well, I’m sure a water cooler has all the chances to cool down the aluminum body of the F11124-ASL-1 but from here to cooling a laptop there’s a small thing called ‘low contact surface’. Almost all laptops today feature rubber pads to raise them from the surface of your desk. The idea is to get some air beneath your laptop to cool down hot components.

Water cooling notebook pad concept

In the case of SonData F11124-ASL-1, a raised laptop means no contact between the bottom of the notebook and the cooling pad (or little contact), so that cool aluminum goes to waste, or if you’re lucky enough gets just a few degrees lower temperature, that’s it.  Below is a scheme with the internal components of SonData F11124-ASL-1 that better illustrate what I wrote above. So my conclusion is pretty easy to spot: innovation that doesn’t help too much.

Internal schematics

Via EverythingUSB