NP8660 + Zalman cooling system

I have read a couple of reviews with the Zalman cooling systems and I am quite impressed; however, I havent come to a review specifically for the NP8660. I am wondering if the airvents on the cooler meet the cooling vent (mainly where the fan is) on the NP8660. Also which would best meet the vents, NC1000 or the NC2000?

So for those who have these, some feedback/comments would be nice! thanks.

 

I have the Zalman NC1000. Works very well for me. In my opinion, the internal cooling of the NP8660 is so robust that the cooler doesn't have to do that much work to be effective.

 

I have the Zalman NC2000. I have seen both units, and I believe that the NC2000 is designed more to cool the Hard Drive at the front of the unit, as the idle temperatures drop dramatically when using the cooler (from 45C to 39C).

Saying this, the NC2000 does give you the option to send the airflow through the notebook's cooling system by placing the notebook lower down on the pad.

 

The air vents match well, imo, unless you have GPU overheating issues (you shouldn't on this system, and if you do there's something mechanically wrong), as a lot of the air will be directed at the bottom vents of the notebook (cpu, ram, and especially hdd). I have a Zalman NC2000 which keeps me at around 48C idle/52-54C load, less if I'm power saving and have the cooler on max, which is about 8-10C lower than without it (normal mode) (yeah, really). Max cooling on the Zalman, idle and in power save mode (half speed gpu) I end up around 40-41C usually (but then I have cold hands ).

 

The cooler is able to cover all the vents on the laptop, except the exhaust at the back.

 

what contributes to a hot HDD? I have a M860TU with WDC 320GB 7200RPM and most of the time it idles at 55C, sometimes idle at 49C. Is it just because of the brand? Or temps are regardless of the HDD brand?

And why is it that sometimes the heat in the right palmrest of the laptop is not that high? But sometimes it gets irritating. All my drivers are updated including the latest intel matrix storage manager for the HDD.

 

Hi Kevin, like I said in my PM, many background services like Indexing, Superfetch and scheduled tasks (such as disk defragmenter in Vista) can cause the hard drive to become accessed more often.

I've also noticed that the hard drive becomes very warm in a room with a high ambient temperature, or if you are using the notebook on a bed, or other fabriced surface.

 

I already made sure that Indexing, superfetching, offline files, volume shadow copy, scheduled disk defragmenter are all turned off in my laptop. In other words, I already optimized this lappy. No more frequent LED activities indicated by the HDD access LED of the laptop. But still, for example now, I'm idle at 58C, I don't why it reaches that high.

I'm using the laptop now in a very hard surface (not bed and fabric surfaces). What is the max temp of your HDD when you are in a high ambient temperature room?

I have two residency currently, one in a residential area (sea level) and the other one is in a 14th floor condominium unit. I've noticed that the idle temps of 49C for the HDD, as I've stated above, is happening when I'm staying at the condo unit. I experience the 58C when I'm in my residential place. Could this be a factor?

 

My desktop has Vista with all services turned on. Maybe it's a 3.5'' HDD isntead of 2.5'' but it still runs at 30-33 max. So I blame more the low airflow and heat caused by other components.

 

I believe the NP8660 has no vents for where the HDD is..No clue as to why it would not have any...I just wish these SSD take over HDD completely already