Razer just convinced me that I do need a gaming laptop cooling pad after all

The Razer Laptop Cooling Pad brings active cooling to your laptop, with a 140mm fan that can shed 18% from your laptop's CPU and GPU temps.

Ever keen to find a new niche of accessories for your gaming hardware, Razer has unveiled a new addition for gaming laptop owners looking to keep their on-the-go gaming gadgets cool as a cucumber. The Razer Laptop Cooling Pad does exactly what its name suggests, providing a resting place for your laptop that actively keeps it cool with a large fan. It’s not a new idea, but Razer has added a couple of features that put this option ahead of many others.

While the best gaming laptop designs should really be able to keep themselves cool in most conditions, in actuality they all benefit from external active cooling. Even if the fan is doing nothing more than cooling the outer case of the laptop – perhaps there aren’t ventilation grilles for the internal fans on the underside of your laptop – it will still help wick heat away more rapidly. However, Razer‘s new version does even more besides.

The Razer Laptop Cooling Pad, then, incorporates a 140mm fan that sucks in air from underneath the angled pad and blows it onto the underside of your laptop. Along with this active cooling, its USB and power connections provide the pad with RGB lighting (how could Razer not?) and a three-port USB hub. This makes it an ideal one-stop hub for your laptop, so you can just drop it onto the pad, plug in one USB port, and automatically connect up to three devices, though notably there isn’t an obvious option for connecting your monitor to your laptop.

So far so quite common. However, the Razer Laptop Cooling Pad combines two crucial little extras. For a start, the top of the pad has a foam seal around the top. With your laptop positioned correctly, this helps the pad actively push air through the cooling system of your laptop (assuming your laptop has underside fan intakes) enhancing its cooling ability. We have a slight concern about how this could interact with some internal cooling fans – it’s often not the best idea to force air from one fan onto another – but setting the pad’s fan to only slightly boost airflow shouldn’t be a problem.

What’s more, this forced airflow is filtered by a removable dust filter that sits in front of the intake of the pad’s fan. This should help to reduce the build-up of dust in your laptop while in use on your desk, potentially prolonging the overall life of your laptop, and at the very least prolonging the time before you’ll need to dismantle it to clean the fans (though a blast of canned compressed air often takes care of the worst of any dust build-up).

All told, the Razer Laptop Cooling Pad will no doubt make for a legitimately cooler-running system. And with overheating being such a regular limitation on laptop performance, there’s the potential for you to actually get slightly better gaming performance by using a cooling pad such as this one.

As for Razer Laptop Cooling Pad price, it’s undeniably high at $149.99. However, while ultra-budget cooling pads can be found for under $20, more directly competing products – those with large single fans and foam seals – regularly cost close to $100.

If you’re looking to complete your ultimate gaming laptop setup, why not browse our best gaming mouse guide to find the ideal rodent for your gaming needs?