So you say that you didn't notice the laptop temperature getting any lower, but this isn't too surprising to me, since this thing is going to be highly thermally limited.

I suspect that your setup is doing something, but the thing it's doing is allowing your laptop to sustain a certain performance level for longer. So what I would look at is some performance metric like e.g. peakflops() in a loop, or a video game FPS counter, and compare with and without the external fans.

▲

BoppreH 21 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The laptop fans are also targeting a set (maximum) temperature. If you provide external cooling, the internal fans will simply work less and the temperature will remain stable. So check the RPM of the internal fans too.

	▲	keyringlight 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Another factor is the CPU behaviour. The CPU involved in the article is intel, but IIRC for AMD Zen4 (at least for desktop) they made them boost up to a relatively high but well within spec temperature, rather than leaving performance on the table that only tweakers will see. The better your cooling capability the more you'll get but it caused a few people to freak out a little. Aspects like that are why I reserve the noisy part of my fan curve for when temperatures are going beyond normal.

▲

qtqtqt 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Exactly. If you increase the capacity of a bus in a highly crowded area, the bus will still have 100% occupancy, but that doesn't mean it didn't help. The throughput increased.

▲

veltas 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Much like adding an extra lane to a highway, more people will use the highway and you'll be back to the same crawl. But technically there's more flow/capacity.

	▲	_diyar an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Curious that you are being downvoted for the car analogy when the bus analogy you're replying to is functionally identical.