For hot rooms and hot climates
The review was written in a cool room. You do not work in one.
Every cooler in every laptop is rated against the air around it. Move that air from 22 degrees to 34 and the same machine holds a different level. No review will tell you what yours does in your room. This will.
What the report tells you
Three figures, each with its reading.
Settled level
%
What the machine holds in the room it is actually in. This is the only figure that describes your machine rather than a reviewer's.
Time to settle
s
How long before it hits its limit. In a warm room this comes sooner, and the gap between a cool morning and a hot afternoon is often larger than the gap between two machines.
The same test, twice
compare
Run it in the coolest part of the day and again in the hottest. The difference is what the room is costing you, measured rather than guessed.
The diagnosis
The shape of the curve, read for your case.
01Settles quickly and low
The cooler is saturated. It is moving heat as fast as it can into air that is already warm, and no fan curve fixes air temperature.
02A slide that gets steeper the longer it runs
Heat is accumulating faster than it leaves. Raising the machine off the desk and clearing the intake underneath is the cheapest thing that has ever helped this.
03Fine in the morning, poor by afternoon
The machine is not degrading. The room is. This is the pattern that gets misread as a failing laptop more than any other.
Every class comes with a stated confidence and the measurement’s own noise floor. How the shape is read
Where a browser stops
What it cannot tell you.
- No ambient temperature: nothing in a browser can read the room. Compare two runs at different times of day and let the difference speak.
- No component temperature either, so the report shows heat as an effect on the curve and never as a number in degrees.
- It cannot separate a hot room from a dusty machine on a single run. Both produce a slide; a clean-out and a re-run is what separates them.
Which run
Deep, 8 minutes.
In a warm room the difference between a machine that copes and one that does not appears in the third minute, which the standard run does not reach.
Both kinds are free. The choice is on the set-up screen.
Questions
Asked in these words.
- Is my laptop faulty, or is it just hot here?
- Run the same test twice: once at the coolest hour you can manage, once in the heat of the afternoon. A machine that holds up in the morning and slides in the afternoon is not faulty, it is thermally limited by the room. A machine that slides in both is worth opening up.
- Does a cooling pad actually help?
- Sometimes, and this will tell you whether it did on your machine rather than in general. Run it once without, once with, and compare the settled level. That is a real answer for your laptop instead of an argument in a forum thread.
- Should I just use it on battery to keep it cooler?
- No. On battery most machines drop their power limit, so you get a cooler machine that is slower for a different reason, and the report flags battery runs precisely so the two are never confused.