Our laptops and netbooks are excellent things, they allow us to be much more mobile, and in some instances they’ve replaced desktop computers. I like my netbooks and laptop quite a bit and I want them to last, and we all know heat is a major enemy of computer components, it can not only damage them but can shorten the life of the product as well. No matter how well the laptop is made, it will still get hot, and that’s not a good thing really, so we’ve got to find a way to keep it cool. One way of doing this is getting a laptop cooler, but which one to get?
Today for review I’ve got another Thermaltake product, this one is called the Massive 23 ST, it’s a notebook cooler, and as you can gather by its name it’s big. The Massive ST features a body made of plastic and metal, making it lightweight for portability, but in the center of it is a 200mm cooling fan to make sure your laptop or netbook stays nice and cool. I’ve got the Acer Aspire one D250 and I noticed that after using it for a while it can get quite hot, so I decided to test out the Massive 23 ST with it to see if it can help keep it cool…
Info:
Features:
-Oversized definitely quiet 230mm Blue LED fan accelerates airflow to improve overall heat dissipation
-Built-in Blue LED On/Off switch to easily adapt to different working or gaming environment
-Ultra-lightweight ABS Plastic material combines with black metal mesh stylish design
-USB powered cable eliminates bulky AC power adapter
-Supports laptop size from 10” ~ 17”, especially for wide-screen laptop
Specs:
Compatibility: For 10″ ~ 17″ Notebook
Heatsink Dimension: 360 (L) x 319 (W) x 52 (H) mm / 14.17 (L) x 12.56 (W) x 2.05 (H) in
Heatsink Material: Plastic + Metal Mesh
Weight: 890 g
Cooling:
Fan Dimension: 200 x 200 x 20 mm
Fan Speed: 600 ± 200 RPM
Noise Level: 17 dBA
Max. Air Flow: 57 CFM
Max. Air Pressure: 0.37 mmH2O
LED Fan: Blue LED Fan (x1)
Power Connector: USB
What’s in the Box?:
The packaging for the Massive 23 St is nicely done, it’s got pictures and specs listed, and the inside we find the product is packaged very well.
Once we unpack it we find the cooler itself, along with a user manual and USB power cable. The on/off switch for the cooler is set in-line, which is a nice feature.
The Massive 23 ST is made of plastic and metal, a metal mesh to be exact covering the 200m fan in the center of the cooler. On the back end you’ll find an LED power light and the power connection.
Installation, Performance and Comparison:
There’s not much to the whole installation process, just set your netbook or laptop on it, plug it into the USB port and then turn it on, couldn’t be much simpler really.
Here’s a few pictures of different sized laptops and netbooks on the Massive 23 ST cooler, an Asus EEEPC 900a 8.9”, Dell Latitude C640 14.1” and the Acer Aspire One D250 10.1”:
Turing it on the fan does light up a nice light blue color, almost purple really:
My Dell is getting old, about time to retire it actually, I much prefer to use my netbook anymore as I really don’t need all of the power of the full-sized laptop for just browsing the internet, email and word processing. As I mentioned in the intro, I noticed my Acer Aspire One D250 does get hot after using it for a bit, so testing will be done with the Aspire One and the Massive 23 ST cooler.
Ambient room temperature during testing was 24C (+/- .3C).
Now for testing I like to get full load on the CPU to really generate some heat, and to do this I use Orthos Stress Prime. Now it’s not likely that you’ll ever have your laptop under full 100% load for any amount of time as I did for the testing, so I’ve also included what I call Idle temperatures as well in the chart. Idle is letting the computer boot up, and then doing some light work, like browsing the internet, watching some Hulu or Netflix and maybe a bit of word processing thrown in as well.
Each test was run for one hour and I used CoreTemp 99.5 to monitor and log the CPU temperatures, then they were averaged out to get the results shown in the graph below.
I ran three different tests, one just with the Aspire One sitting on a wooden table, the next on the Massive 23 ST without the fan running and then on the Massive 23 ST with the fan running.
As you can see the Massive 23 ST does offer very good cooling performance over using nothing at all. With the fan on, as expected, we got the largest difference in temperatures at load, about a ten degree drop from just sitting on the table. At Idle though, there’s not much of a difference between using the fan or not, but there is a nice difference between using the Massive 23 ST and not using it at all. A cool laptop is a happy laptop, and I think my Acer Aspire One is happier now.
I’d also like to point out the fan is virtually silent, I had to actually check and make sure it was on, that’s how quiet it is. So that’s a good thing there.
The performance is excellent with the Massive 23 ST as you can see by my results, but I do have a couple small complaints or observations.
The first would be that it’s huge, now this isn’t much of a problem for a really big laptop, but it seems a netbook gets lost, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be carrying it around with me, even though it is very lightweight. On the other hand though, using the Massive 23 ST with my Aspire One was actually comfortable, the extra space allowed me a place to rest my wrists up closer to the keyboard.
The one real complaint I could have is that you will lose a USB port, the Aspire One has three USB ports, but my other netbook only has two, and normally I do use a USB mouse with my netbooks, I don’t care for the track pads at all really. Having three USB ports wouldn’t be a problem, I can use on for the Massive 23 ST, one for my mouse and one for whatever else, but with only having two I can only use the mouse and the cooler. A better design for the plug would have been to make it a pass-through style or even incorporate a USB hub into the cooler itself.
My Dell actually only has one USB port, but I’m not even going to go there with that configuration, hate it…
Conclusion:
The Massive 23 ST is no doubt a well performing product, it works and works well. It is nicely made, looks good, it’s lightweight and the included fan is virtually silent. The addition of the in-line power switch is nice then you don’t have to reach around to the back of the cooler to turn it off, having it in-line places it in an easily reachable spot.
Overall the Thermaltake Massive 23 ST is good product, that I can recommend you giving a try.
Pros:
+Cools well
+Lightweight
+Seems well made
+Very quiet fan
+In-line on/off switch
Cons:
-Really big
-Uses USB port, no pass through
I would like to thank Thermaltake for the chance to review the Massive 23T Notebook Cooler and for their support of iGadget Life.
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