Which cooler, coolermaster U3 or X3?

So am trying to decide between the CM U3 and X3.

The X3 shifts more air and is quieter but is plastic and has one 200mm fan

The U3 has 3 moveable 80mm fans and is metal construction, which to my mind, will aid heat dissipation as i am presuming the actual stand will also act as a heat sink?

Has anyone experience of these two coolers and if so which would they choose and why?

 

I bought the U3, but only use its base and got rid of the fans.

The fans are of very low quality and only useful if you plan on overclocking, in which case it can 'shave' a 3-5 degrees, but nothing more. If you don't plan on overclocking, don't bother, it doesn't cool anything beyond the default.

The base of the cooler is light and high quality, though, so that's something to consider.

 

Hi Amirfoox,

Ah right, thats useful to know, it does seem a bit pointless if they only cool by 3-5 degrees, I was hoping 10-15 but I suppose just blowing ambient temp air at the underside of a laptop will never be the most efficient cooling method available lol

Good point on the stand itself though, I rather like the ability to place the laptop within the frame for easy transportation but what use is the frame if the purpose i want it for is not that effective?

Anyway, appreciate the reply and the info mate, thanks for that, definitely given me food for thought. :thumbsup:

 

Well, my laptop has a fairly robust cooling performance as it is, so that must be the reason. A lower end model might benefit much more from this unit, so take that into consideration as well, but I seriously doubt you'll ever see a 10-15 difference, regardless of how good is the cooler and how awful is the laptop's cooling performance.

3-5 degrees is considered excellent given the circumstances, I believe, and I do plan on using the fans when the laptop will get older and I would be forced to OC it just to run games on it.

I wouldn't recommend getting the cooler for the base alone, of course, but my point was that it wasn't all bad - the base is very good, it has many tiny holes for a good airflow and feel sturdy. Either way, the X3 wasn't a terrible purchase, but a notebook cooler is a fairly useless novelty, in my opinion.

 

I wanted to revisit this thread:

I bought the Cooler Master U3 and it didn't lower my temps at all, so I removed the cooler fans and used just the base.

I'm now moving to a warm country, so after reading quite a lot of reviews, I cracked and ordered the Cooler Master Storm SF-19 and just received it. It was surprisingly light. I put it under my Clevo, and just for the hell of it, I cranked the fans to full blast and started playing Borderlands 2 for a few minutes.

Without a cooler and with the U3, my load temps reached 75-76 C, but never surpassed it. I'll let the max results from the SF-19 speak for themselves:

02, 04-04-2013 11:20:39, GPU temperature ,GPU usage ,Core clock ,Memory clock ,Memory usage ,Framerate ,Frametime
80, 04-04-2013 11:26:14, 66.000 ,98.000 ,718.548 ,1800.000 ,585.063 ,60.100 ,21.937

I take it back: a notebook cooler isn't a useless novelty, an inadequate one - is. It appears that a U3 is not suitable for gaming laptops, at least when it comes to Clevos, but the SF-19 is a small wonder. Shaving 10 C without any cooling mods for the laptop is not something I even dreamed on witnessing. I recommend this beast to anyone who has a gaming laptop and think that we should probably stop suggesting the U3.

 

Thanks for sharing that Amirfoox, I always found it counter intuitive that blowing air from a cooler into the bottom vents of any laptop (where hot air is supposed to exit) would in any way lower temps but you have proved my thinking faulty. The only way I can ever get a 5 Celcius drop is to lower my GPU clocks to 90/130 on my ASUS. BTW that is one heck of a machine you have there!