Logitech N100 USB Laptop Cooler Review

The back, top and bottom of the cooler feature a plastic grill on all sides to vent air from the back and bottom of the cooler up toward where it counts, on the back of your notebook's major components. Unfortunately the air path is left relatively wide so you'll find that the tiny 80mm fan has a hard time to push any decent amount of air past all of your notebooks components. The same fan fortunately also runs at a very slow RPM and thus, very quietly. The low fan speed is attributed to the low power requirement, needing only 115mA current from any USB port to power the lone 3.1" (80mm) fan, similar to the one found on Belkin Cooling Pad.

The N100 USB Laptop Cooler with its minimalist design.

This shows all the grills on the back of the cooler.

On top of the cooler, there are also two rubber grips to help position and keep your notebook in place when the cooler is mobile with your notebook on top. The grips offer some decent resistance to notebooks with a flush bottom profile, but are trickier with notebooks equipped with larger 12 cell stacked batteries that don't have a lot of horizontal surface space to line up with the grips. I would have liked to be able to relocated these rubber grips to fit our unusual battery pack better, but managed to work around this short-coming. During testing, I had a hard time to get our 15.4" notebook to slip off these rubber grips, but given one hard enough bump you could easily find your notebook lying in pieces on the floor and only your N100 cooler left in your hands. Interestingly Logitech markets the N100 to support up to 15.6" sized laptops, which are the new ones with 16:9 aspect ratio display.

If you have a heavy duty battery like I do, the laptop won't be able to line up with the grips on the N100 cooler's surface.

The ingenious thing about Logitech's design is the clever routing Logitech designers have placed into the base of the unit with deep trenches running into multiple directions along the coolers base and exiting on all sides to accommodate any possible direction that you'd like to route the USB cable to. So no matter where your USB port may be placed on your notebook you are virtually guaranteed to reach the port without having any excess USB cabling floating around from the cooler. Why no other notebook cooler manufacturer had figured this out ahead of Logitech is a complete mystery to me now.

The underside of the N100 USB Laptop Cooler reveals the tiny 3.1" (80mm) USB powered fan.

Portability & Ruggedness
The Logitech N100 USB Laptop Cooler's slim profile (measuring at 15" x 1.9" x 11.2") makes it easy to slip it into a backpack alongside your notebook or netbook. Its weight is light enough to carry back and forth between work and home. Compared to the Choiix and the Antec 200 Laptop Cooler, the Logitech N100 is easily as portable and even more rugged because of its simple design.

The plastic tooling of the cooler is fairly scratch resistant and even when damaged, the damage is hard to pin-point. The same can not be said for dropping the cooler from waist height on to a concrete floor. My Logitech cooler did get a tiny dent but still managed to stay intact.

Lone Fan Cooling Performance
To test the cooling effectiveness I utilized my Hewlett Packard Pavilion dv6746ca notebook 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. Central Processing Unit (CPU) and Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) component temperatures were monitored using the SpeedFan application. Hard drive temperatures were monitored using HDTune.

I honestly didn't expect much from the lone 3.1" (80mm) fan whizzing away quietly underneath my notebook, but starting with my HP lappy running at an idle temperature of 54°C for the CPU, 60°C for the GPU and 55°C for the built-in hard disk drive (HDD). Even though the fan has a low cubic foot per minute potential, the USB cooler's concave design really starts paying off with the idle temperatures almost immediately dropping to 52°C (CPU), 54°C (GPU) and 53°C (HDD).

Not necessarily a large drop in temperature, but based on previous experience, notebook coolers usually only show their true potential when exposed to a larger heat source, and so I continue with my load tests by starting two processes of Prime95, each running on it's own processor core and the Adrianna Demo running on the notebook simultaneously. With all of these running, I should be able to simulate the maximum heat transfer capability of the notebook cooler fairly accurately.

After leaving the notebook running our load tests for approximately 10 minutes, I started taking temperature readings of 58°C (CPU), 62°C (GPU) and 64°C (HDD). Then I got these readings when running without a cooler (62°C CPU, 68°C GPU, 67°C HDD). This is quite an amazing drop for such an under-powered cooler design, which shows that it's not necessarily the cooler that influences the cooling capability as much as a good design.

Recap
The Logitech N100 USB Laptop Cooler may not be the most feature-rich one on the market with the biggest fan and highest CFM rating, it excels with a quiet and effective cooling solution for anyone looking for a well designed and good looking cooler. While it may also not be as overwhelming as the Antec 200 Notebook Cooler with its LED lit 200mm fan and Choiix with its multi-functional notebook dock, the N100 has its own style and charm.