Disabling laptop fan and relying solely on a notebook cooler?

Is it plausible to turn of your laptop's fan (mine is broken and makes a lot of noise when it turns on) and rely purely on the cooling providing by an external notebook cooler? I'm looking at this option because it would be a lot cheaper and less of a hassle to just buy a notebook cooler and not have to spend a lot of money buying the fan and a lot of down time waiting for it to get replaced.

 

I think it would depend on how good your notebook cooler is, but I think this would certainly be possible. What you need to do is get some temp monitoring software and closely watch your temps for a little while and make sure they don't get too hot when you are just using your notebook cooler. Also, let your CPU throttle instead of running full speed all the time and that will help cut down temps as well.

 

I think it would be fine as long as you don't do any gaming or any other kinds of intensive tasks.

 

It's gonna be tough, as the internal fan cools the insides more effectively, as a notebook cooler is only blowing air onto the outside shell.

 

If I were to go down this route, what kind of software would I download to disable the internal fan?

 

I think this would be a problem. The internal fan directly blows on the heatsink that cools the cpu/gpu. If u stop that, I don't think that an external fan is going to have enough power to cool off the heatsink that covers the cpu/gpu.

 

I don't think you can because the BIOS is the one who controls the fan. I may be wrong though. Have you tried opening up your laptop and injecting some WD-40 in your fan? Is your laptop still under warranty?

 

Bad idea, IMHO. No external cooler is going to cool your processor/ gfx as efficiently as your internal fan. After all, it's a question of airflow. There's no way it can send in the required amount of air inside the chassis. Even with severe undervolting, this would not be feasible. Only you have a supercool notebook, where the fan rarely turned on, then you can think of something like this. It'd be a better idea to replace the fan, unless your nb is already reaching the end of its useful life.

 

I'm joining the "bad idea" chorus.
The important thing when it comes to cooling is airflow. The internal fan's entire purpose is to ensure airflow, so hot air from the CPU/GPU heatsink doesn't stay there. It doesn't matter if it's freezing outside the notebook, if there's no airflow to get the hot air out there.

(Of course, you could simply test it by sticking a pencil or something in the fan to prevent it from running for a while, and see how hot your system gets)

 

I don't recommend it.

What you are wanting to do is the equivalent of turning off your refrigerator and using your air conditioner to keep your food fresh in your refrigerator. Might work for fruit but don't invite me over for steak.

 

Lol that's great...very good analogy.

 

I'm going to join everyone else on this. Very bad idea.

 

I highly doubt it would work. First of all a notebook cooler circulates cool air on the exterior of the laptop (well the underside). The internal fan usually sucks this air up to cool the cpu/gpu. Without it you simply are not cooling the internal components enough. The internal fan would be blocking airflow to gpu/cpu.

The only way I can see this working is, if you remove the cpu/gpu cover so air is blowing directly. This will leave your components exposed to accidental damage. FATAL...

Some notebooks won't start if it detects the fan is not working/removed.