Choiix Air Through Stash Notebook USB Cooling Pad Review

First and foremost, the unit comes with an 80mm fan built into the center and covered by a thin plastic grill. This fan is then powered by USB alone which is connected from the cooler to the notebook via the included Y-USB cable which should be plugged into two Type A USB ports on your notebook/netbook. During testing I also discovered the fan itself can be powered by utilizing only one Type A USB port on your notebook (albeit at the loss of power for the integrated USB hub and SATA hard drive compartment). The included USB cable is also of sufficient length to reach around any 15" sized computer placed on the cooler.

The Choiix C-HL04-KP also uses a unique method of operation compared to other notebook coolers by pulling air from the back of the cooler and then pushing it on to the back of your notebook base and venting it out of the underside of your notebook.

The side of the cooler features a button to control the on / off state of the integrated fan and an LED to indicate if the fan unit is active in which case it lights up green or if data is being transferred via the integrated SATA hard drive dock by turning amber. The same LED does not indicate if data is being transferred on the USB hub which makes sense since it would be hard to code the criteria on what counts as real traffic versus idle USB packets.

The integrated USB 2.0 hub's three USB ports are strategically placed at the back of the unit to stay conveniently out of the way during general notebook use. This USB hub will also remain active even when the fan is disabled via the included power button leaving users the freedom to switch the fan unit on only when needed during those hot summer days. Spacing between the USB ports is adequate so that even the widest of USB connectors should be able to populate all three ports. Unfortunately Choiix decided to use a Single Transaction Tranlator (TT) hub chip which will reduce the available bandwidth shared between devices when all USB ports are populated with a mixture of high-/full-speed devices.

The USB hub also shares power with the integrated Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive dock and 80mm fan, using both the integrating fan and SATA hard drive dock will leave your USB ports wanting for power and your USB devices inoperable since the full 1 Amp (A) supplied from your notebook has to be shared equally among all three components (80mm Fan, USB hub, SATA hard drive dock). Unfortunately the coolers documentation does not clarify which feature takes priority between the different components built into this cooler so using any high current draw devices such as a bus-powered Western Digital Passport 2.5" external hard drive on the hub could cause all your attached devices to either fail during enumeration or during data transfer.

Should the USB hub, SATA hard drive or 80mm need more power, the Choiix cooler also features a 3.5mm barrel jack on the back that can accept a 5V - 2A power supply but sadly no power supply is included with the unit.

The SATA hard drive dock does support hard disk drives and solid state disks up to 500G 2.5" form factor with a SATA I/II interface and once a drive is attached it will show up in Device Manager as a removable storage device. The hard drive dock is tool-less and allows an easy swap of the storage device, however, the cooler must be turned upside down before the dock cover can be slid off. The inside of the dock is also fitted with rubber pieces to act as shock dampeners and to absorb vibrations generated while accessing the hard drive.

With no gripping surface on the mixed matt and glossy plastic finish of the coolers top, the cooler will not fare well with notebooks that don't have rubber / polyurethane feet placed in the appropriate locations to prevent your notebook or netbook from sliding off. Choiix does include four rubber feet to attach to either your notebook's belly or the notebook coolers top surface but during testing I found these to be very ineffective.

The design of the cooler also makes no accommodation for notebooks with expanded battery packs. This will cause a lot of the fan's exhaust to vent straight out of the sides of the cooler without ever taking any of the hot air from the surface of the notebook with it as you'll see in my temperature testing results.

The cooler does not feature any adjustable height options to change the angle of the positioned notebook and allow for comfortable typing so if your notebook keyboard is already slanted when placed on a flat surface, expect the angle to be exaggerated when placed on the Choiix notebook cooler.

Portability & Ruggedness
During day to day use and running back and forth between the office and home, I've managed to conveniently pack the Choiix notebook cooler into my backpack and managed to scratch the unit a few times already. For readers looking for a portable notebook cooler, the size of the Choiix cooler is ideal for your backpack and the convenient low profile makes it ideal for storing in satchels, just don't expect it to keep it's near-new look if you are planning on moving it around a lot.

Choiix Cooling...
To test the effectiveness of the Choiix notebook cooler I utilized my Hewlett Packard Pavilion dv6746ca notebook built with an AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60 based dual core processor and an entry-level notebook gaming graphics card, the nVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS. After some hand-modifications to the internal components I was able to lower the heat generated by the notebook by nearly 20ºC by removing excessively thick thermal pads and badly applied thermal interface material (TIM). All notebook component temperatures were monitored using the SpeedFan application.

To test the affect of Choiix's 80mm fan I then started two processes of Prime95, each running on it's own processor core and the Adrianna Demo running on my notebook simultaneously. Running at idle the central processing unit (CPU) would generate 54ºC on average and 62ºC on the graphics processing unit (GPU), use of the cooler would effectively lower the temperature by 2ºC on the CPU and 4ºC on the GPU, not an amazing result but a result none-the-less. Once the Adrianna Demo and two processes of Prime95 started the notebook would rapidly increase temperatures up to 64ºC for the CPU and 70ºC for the GPU. As some of you may know from my previous reviews the heat quickly dissipates to the touch-pad on the notebook making it hard to touch for more than 10 seconds. Using the Choiix notebook cooler I could immediately see some results with a lowered CPU temperature reading of 64ºC and a temperature reading of 68ºC for the GPU. Based on the above results it appears that the hotter the notebook got, the worse the Choiix notebook cooler performed showing just how inadequate the 80mm fan is for this type of product.

USB Hub Performance
Unfortunately it is hard to test any USB hub's true performance so I simply ran my Seagate FreeAgent Go Portable Hard Drive connected to one of the Hub's USB ports and transferred a mixture of 1kB to 120MB file sizes populated with random data patterns. I did manage to extract the vendor ID (0x1A40) of the hub but was unable to source it back to any specific manufacturer even from the USB-IF's own USB Vendor ID list.

Using Robocopy, the scores for both read and write were in the same range as previous results using a direct connection and show that the hub handles mass storage class USB devices well. I also ran the USB hub through the USB-IF's own USB verification tool, USB Command Verifier and the hub passed with no failures on Chapter 9 Hub tests.

USB to SATA Dock Performance
To test the SATA drive dock I utilized a Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB 2.5 inch SATA hard drive and Microsoft's Robocopy tool to transfer the same mix of 1kB to 120MB file sizes to and from the hard drive without any other USB devices attached.

While the Seagate hard drive is SATA II and should be able to achieve a maximum theoretical data throughput of 3.0Gigabits/second ( ), the drive dock interfaces with the notebook via USB and thus is also limited by the available USB bandwidth (480Mbps). Add to this the overhead for BULK USB transactions and you are looking at fairly similar results to what was achieved in the above benchmark with 28 MegaBytes/second for read and 25.3 MegaBytes/second for write transfers. Personally I would have loved to see an eSATA interface on the Choiix cooler to get the maximum benefit of adding a SATA II hard drive permanently to the cooler.

Improvements Pending
My wish-list for an improved and revised Choiix notebook cooler would include a full rubber top surface with appropriate grip grooving to keep any size notebook in it's place, a 200mm fan to replace the mediocre performance and loud noises eminating from the 80mm fan and a easy to reach removable hard drive bay that allows you to pull your 2.5" notebook hard drive from the notebook cooler at any time and double as a self-contained external 2.5" hard drive enclosure when you're on the move.

Cooling capabilities aside, the unit itself is not badly built but could definitely do with a revised build. For those readers looking for a small, compact, light-weight netbook cooler, Choiix's product is a good attempt but for those readers using 15.4" or larger sized notebooks I would recommend to stick with the Antec USB Notebook Cooler 200. While you may not get an integrated USB hub or a SATA hard drive dock, the Antec cooler surpasses the cooling capability of the Choiix cooler exponentially.

Recap
The Choiix C-HL04-KP notebook / netbook cooler is an interesting design for use on the road or on your desktop to dock your notebook to and expand your computers capabilities. Unfortunately the inclusion of an 80mm fan is it's biggest down-fall since it does the one thing it was meant to with only moderate success. While I cannot recommend the Choiix notebook cooler for notebooks it does bring with it a lot of unique features that many netbook users may find appealing.