ThinkPad

This is just my personal opinion based on my own direct experience, I’m sure someone could potentially prove me wrong, but here goes:

Cooling pads are snake oil. If your machine is too hot and it’s been in use for a year or two, you need to replace the thermal grease / compound between your CPU/GPU and the heat pipes that transfer heat to your fans. Assuming none of your fans are broken, the thermal compound is the culprit.

This sounds like a difficult task. It’s not. The necessary tools and materials cost about the same as a cooling pad. Generic instructions on YouTube (search “laptop repaste”) should give you a close enough demonstration to perform it on your own machine, but there are likely instructions out there for your specific model.

It’s as simple as: open the laptop case. Unplug the battery connector. Locate the center plate of your heat pipe assembly which will have multiple numbered screws. Unscrew them and lift the heat pipe assembly, exposing your CPU and GPU, which will be two mirror finished metallic surfaces. Clean the old grease off with lint free cloth and 91% isopropyl. Apply a small amount of your new grease (I use arctic mx-5) enough so that when smushed down it will cover the whole chip, but not so much it’ll squirt out the sides. Replace heat pipes and screw down the screws in the order of their numbers, just snug them, don’t go nuts with torque.

My gaming laptop was hitting thermal max of 99C. I did this and it rarely gets above 80C, which is pretty normal for gaming or other high loads. If the air coming out feels warm, that’s a good thing. Before doing any of this use a temperature utility like real temp on windows or btop on Linux to get an idea of how hot it gets. If it’s under 90 on your heaviest use case, don’t even bother.