Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanalltogether | Hacker News Reader

Are there any good macbook laptop stands that act as a heatsink as well? My current stand has rubber grips so while there's plenty of airflow under it the heat isn't being drawn away very well. I don't want to add a fan since that would add noise.

View on HN

I really like the mStand: https://www.raindesigninc.com/mstand.html

It is solid metal with lots of airflow underneath.

I also rate these stands - but it has rubber grips. You're not going to get any heat transfer from laptop to stand, so it's not going to act as a heatsink.

I have the same stand and it does absorb a good amount of heat when the Mac is running at full power (the angle helps there too), albeit not a true "heat sink". The rubber has negligible displacement.

I use the 360 model, which adds a swivel option, and it's been a really useful and stable stand.

I also like this model. There's a little air gap between the computer and the stand, but being solid aluminum I figure it's going to move a lot more heat away than, say, a wooden desk surface or cloth-covered human legs.

I have this one as well, it does a decent job of wicking heat too, the portion of the stand in direct contact with the laptop is noticeably warmer than the part that contacts the table

Amazon Basics has similar thing that is essentially the same but looks a bit less stylish and costs half of what mStand costs. I've been using it for almost 4 years now and it works great.

That's an interesting thought, but you'd have to have a really good seal between the two for it to work (think like processors and thermal paste).

Been a huge fan of the Roost Stand ever since I got it. There's no heat sink, but there's only four small plastic contact points between the laptop and the stand. My fans are often on when running several Docker containers, but the surface of the top bar never gets that hot.

I have a 2018 13" Macbook Pro.

(I'm in no way affiliated with Roost, I'm just a happy customer.)

Roost: https://www.amazon.com/Roost-Laptop-Stand-Adjustable-Portabl...

It'd be interesting to just try resting it on a 1/4" thick steel plate. The thermal capacity would be so high that it'd never really warm up.

That was my though too, those thin stands may look sleek but they don't really do anything in terms of heat transfer. If anything it'd be worse since now the machine has nothing to transfer the heat to.

Aluminium is a much better heat conductor than steel.

I fee like I've seen a lot of thick steel plates around the right size sitting around in old workshops. You could probably find something cheaply from a scrap dealer.

Thick aluminum or copper seems more rare, I don't know if it's commonly produced.

Solid aluminum is not hard to come by. You can probably just walk into your kitchen and pick up a frying pan.

A large slow fan (~10in at ~10rpm) could move a lot of air across the bottom of the laptop very nearly silently.

Do you mean 100 rpm? 10 rpm isn't really going to do anything. When I last looked all of those "laptop cooler pads" use tiny fans that would either be ineffective or loud or both. I settled on the mStand mentioned above, but as noted it has rubber standoffs that prevent it from acting like a true heatsink.

I mean 10rpm, really! A 10" fan at 10rpm moves about as much air as a 2.5" fan at 160rpm.

You're not trying to move huge amounts of air, since heat transfer from the laptop to the air is pretty slow. You just need enough movement to clear out any hot air that is building up under the laptop.

> You just need enough movement to clear out any hot air that is building up under the laptop.

On a nearly totally different tangent, our own bodies build up hot pockets of air indoors as well, where there's no natural breeze to get rid of it. Getting rid of it creates a surprisingly strong cooling effect where you probably won't need AC for a while longer than you expect - and "air circulator" fans are pretty good at doing it over a whole room, so you don't need to keep a fan directed at yourself.

What fan can even run at 10 rpm without stalling? I don’t think most will even go down to 100.

Nope, even 10 rpm is a big change. Going from standing air to any movement is a remarkable change in thermal conductivity.

Any Noctua brand fan will stun you with its silence. I installed four 20mm fans in a network switch to replace its screaming loud factory fans. They're all running ~1200RPM and it now sounds like a small desk fan. A larger format fan running at a few hundred RPM will likely add very little to the ambient noise around you.

Also big fans (bigger than 140mm) are usually running on noisy ball bearings (or roll bearings) while "standard" 120 and 140 fans are often running on silent magnetic suspension.

I find that the TwelveSouth Curve does a much better job at taking heat away than the Rain mStand - I'd guess this is because of airflow.

I use the svalt stand that has a fan in it. Works really well

https://svalt.com/products/cooling-stand

jesus h christ, it's EXPENSIVE for a simple stand.

Even as someone who has owned the Rain Design stands, I thought exactly the same. $160 for a laptop stand?!?

Then I realized, that was "without fans".

$260 for a laptop stand.

basically the ipad pro magic keyboard :P

How noisy is the fan on the svalt?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com