cooler vets: advise me on fan placement for HP Envy 17 & Cooler Master U3

Here is the cooler, a Cooler Master U3 which as you can see has three fans you place yourself, as well as the bottom of the laptop with labels for reference.

The red box shows where the case gets really hot; the orange box shows roughly the area of the palmrest that gets hot. I've drawn yellow boxes around all the grills/vents on the bottom, I don't know what they all do. One of the vents is drawn with an oval because that one gets completely covered up by the bottom of the lid when you open it.




A slight closeup of the area near the red box/hot area, and close-up of vent labeled B, which has the built-in fan:


If more images are needed I will post them, though my camerawork is terrible as is my camera.

Should I leave that area with the laptop's built in fan (B) clear, and put the U3's fans elsewhere? If so, where?

 

I would place the fans on B, C and E. Blowing up into the computer's bottom.

I would be interested to see some before/after temperatures with this setup.

I am tempted to buy the U3 cooler!

 

Lol only 1 person with advice. Maybe if this were a SAGER?? Lol. I put the three fans on B C and E and I get this:



Big improvement over not using the cooler, more than 10 degrees F. Just doing hdd moves, installs, browsing and such though. Will have to test with furmark.

 

is A, a subwoofer?

i'd go with B, C, E for all around cooling or B, C , D if u were exclusively focusing on GPU/CPU cooling.

 

I think B,C,D would actually be your best solution as air from B will just pass thought while C,D would push out of either B or more likely E.

Sure looks like it

 

It is, I'm sure of that. Still rather weird placement of the subwoofer though. I had the U2 and after a while the fans started dying on me though. The way the U series is designed, you're not going to really get any effect if you place a fan under E and F.

 

It's tough putting the fans B C D because it doesn't all fit, those are too close together. I can do B and C, and then E or F. Right now I have B C and E. Browsing, ripping with EAC, copying files, etc, is at around 100 F, light Photoshop takes me to 110ish, 720p movies while browsing at 125-130. Those are good temps right? They go up 5-10 without cooler fans (but on the stand, which is ventilated and elevated).

So there isn't a problem putting a cooler fan directly below B, which has the laptop's built in fan? Some folks have told me you never want to do that as you might damage the built-in fan.

Yeah A is the subwoofer lol. In fact it says so right next to it. I just never thought anyone would put a sub there.

I take your word for it, but I'm just curious, why is that?

 

A cooler?
:GEEK:
Boy you don't need a cooler what you need to do is edit HWmonitor to make the temperatures cooler. I did this and now im running sub-zero temperatures I actually discovered Bose–Einstein condensates.
:GEEK:
/Sarcasm off

On topic:
Go for B/C/E

 

What's a decent basic way to test a cooling setup and get hard comparison numbers? Just run a Furmark cycle on and off the cooler? I don't want to get too involved, I'll leave that to the experts, just want to satisfy my own curiosity.

 

actually 125-130 F is pretty cool