The Best Laptop Cooling Pad and Why You Should Buy One
The concept of using a laptop cooling pad sounds old fashioned. These days, laptop chips are very efficient. Fans on MacBooks (if they have them) are barely used, and both Intel and Qualcomm are pushing efficiency on the Windows front.
But people keep buying laptop cooling pads, so there’s a use case in 2026 that makes sense, right? I tried a few cooling pads paired with a few different gaming laptops, and I was amazed at how well they could work.
Do Cooling Pads Really Work?
Photo: Luke Larsen
Laptop cooling pads have been around for decades, and the idea has always been simple: provide more air to blow through a laptop whose cooling system is restricted. In theory, more air means lower temperatures—and, ultimately, better performance. This is the whole idea of the power modes present in Windows, which increase the RPMs (rotations per minute) of the fans to add more air to both improve performance. In addition, less heat means a longer lasting laptop that doesn’t burn out quickly over time. It is in that same sense that laptop cooling pads come in handy.
The problem, however, is that the cooling pad is an inefficient way to transfer air to your phone. Most laptop cooling pads, including the two I tested, use one large fan or two small fans to blow cold air from the bottom of the laptop. This is the first reason why most modern laptops will not benefit much from a cooling pad, as these laptops usually only have holes near the hinge. Without vents or open holes, blowing air through a sheet of metal or plastic will do nothing to cool the components on the other side. It will only make a lot of fan noise.
Gaming laptops are no exception, however, which is why they are the primary use case for such a thing. Most gaming laptops have a few open slots, usually above the fans, like the Razer Blade 16, which is one of the laptops I used to test these cooling pads. Laptops like the Blade 16 are designed for intensive tasks like gaming, video editing, or local AI processing—and use a more powerful GPU and CPU to get the kind of performance you need. My model has two of the most powerful laptop components on the market: RTX 5090 and Ryzen 9 HX 370. As you can guess, they are productive. a lot temperature when cranked up. Modern chips tend to top out at 100 degrees Celsius, before turning back on to lower the temperature.
Most laptops use fans to cool these components, but the thickness of the computer’s chassis is also a determining factor in how much the system will need to turn back on to keep temperatures low. Ultimately, it’s geometry and physics, and every millimeter of space in a laptop chassis has an effect on how cool it can keep its internal components. And unlike a large desktop PC, you have very limited space. That’s especially true in the modern age, where even gaming laptops are getting smaller.
