Hit 85 degrees Celsius on my laptop and finally built my own cooler

I was messing around with MSI Afterburner last week and saw my CPU hit 85°C while I was just playing Diablo 4. That was the wakeup call I needed. I grabbed a 120mm fan I had lying around, some cardboard, and a USB cable I cut up. Taped the whole thing together in about 20 minutes and now my temps sit at 60°C under max load. I know it looks janky as heck but it works way better than the $40 cooler I bought off Amazon last year. Has anyone else rigged something up that surprised you with how well it worked?

3 comments

3 Comments

wyatt_green15d ago

Ha, @nelson.finley knows the truth - cheap fixes beat expensive junk every time.

the_seth15d ago

That cardboard box fan trick works surprisingly well. I had a buddy back in the day who couldn't afford a real AC unit for his apartment. He literally taped a frozen water bottle to the back of a box fan and called it "ghetto air conditioning." It actually cooled his room down a solid 10 degrees until the ice melted all over his floor. His girlfriend was not happy about the puddle situation. Point is, sometimes the janky stuff works better than you'd think.

nelson.finley15d ago

Dude hell yeah, I love seeing stuff like this! I actually heard about someone doing a similar thing with a cardboard box and a box fan to cool their whole desktop setup, and it dropped temps by like 20 degrees. Your solution sounds way more portable though. I've been thinking about trying something like that with an old laptop cooler I have, maybe just zip tie a bigger fan to it and see what happens. Honestly, half the time the cheap DIY fixes work better than the overpriced stuff you can buy.