Unleash Higher Frame Rates: Razer’s Revolutionary Gaming Laptop Cooling Pad

Razer has recently introduced the creatively-titled Laptop Cooling Pad, which serves as a laptop stand that the brand asserts can enhance your laptop’s performance. It may seem like an RGB-laden novelty of grand scale, but we had the opportunity to try it and can confirm that it genuinely functions.

Although the finest gaming laptops worldwide should possess sufficient built-in cooling capability to optimize their gaming efficiency, the stark reality is that they frequently fall short, and even when adequately equipped, merely placing your laptop on specific surfaces can severely influence the effectiveness of its cooling. Any variation of laptop stand can assist in maximizing your laptop’s cooling capability, but the Razer Laptop Cooling Pad combined with its Razer Hyperboost feature elevates this utility even further.

Razer initially revealed the Laptop Cooling Pad several months ago, and its concept is that it contains a substantial 140mm fan that can channel air upwards and through your laptop, enhancing its cooling and consequently enabling its CPU and GPU to sustain peak clock rates for extended periods for improved performance. Due to the fan’s larger size compared to those within your laptop, it can operate at a lower speed and quieter while delivering the same airflow, or for optimal performance, it can circulate a significantly greater volume of air.

We had the chance to observe its effectiveness firsthand at the Razer booth during the CES trade show happening this week. With one of the company’s Razer Blade laptops – unfortunately not the latest RTX 5090-equipped Razer Blade 16 – positioned on the cooling pad, we noted that the frame rate in Shadow of the Tomb Raider surged from an average of 159fps to 175fps thanks to the enhanced cooling.

However, there are two important notes regarding this remarkable result. The first is that we witnessed this particularly notable increase using a Razer laptop that was also utilizing the company’s Hyperboost feature. This is a new software upgrade available to all recent Razer Blade laptops that allows them to recognize when they’re connected to the cooling pad and actively apply peak boost frequencies to the CPU and GPU.

In the absence of this software feature actively pushing the CPU and GPU to their maximums, there’s no assurance that your laptop’s CPU and GPU will indeed clock any higher with the introduction of additional cooling. There’s a strong chance, but not an assurance.

The second aspect is noise. Although the cooling pad can assist in keeping your gaming laptop operating cooler and quieter than it would otherwise, enabling Hyperboost and seeking to achieve peak performance will result in the fans of both the laptop and the cooling pad spinning rapidly and loudly.

Nonetheless, it’s beneficial to have the choice of toggling between cool and quiet operation and peak performance mode, particularly if you own a high-quality gaming headset equipped with noise-cancellation. A headset like the Razer Barracuda Pro or the Alienware Pro Wireless can fulfill that need.

For more updates from the CES event, explore our CES news hub, which includes an overview of many new AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics cards and Asus’ daunting new gaming router.