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Klim Wind laptop cooling pad: review
The Klim Wind is a laptop cooling pad that’s very much aimed at the average gamer. While it may not have the oomph required by pro esports players or creative studios, it’s aimed at those who just want to stop their CPUs cooking while playing Cyberpunk 2077.
It rocks four fans capable of spinning at up to 1200rpm and comes in a range of colorways, and it’s available from Amazon from just $19.97 / £19.97 / AU$49.97.
A big selling point of the Klim Wind is how quiet it is. In fact, the packaging describes it as ‘ultra silent’, which is a) redundant, given that something is either silent or it isn’t; and b) not actually true.
However, its fan noise is impressively muted – during testing, the combined noise of its fans at 1200rpm and the inbuilt cooling of our Acer Predator Helios 300 testing laptop with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU only registered as 58.5dB from a few inches away and 44dB from my head height. That’s pretty much as quiet as any laptop cooling pad I’ve tested.
I feel a little lukewarm about the Klim’s design. On the one hand, its 16-degree angle is comfortable enough, even if I wish it had a few different height settings, and its blue LED lighting feels nicely understated. On the other, its build quality isn’t as high as some of the best laptop cooling pads, feeling a bit light and plasticky, while the flip-up laptop rests jabbed at my wrists when I was resting them on my laptop. Also, with all its notches and sharp angles, its looks are a bit on the nose – it looks like a cyber-goth butterfly, which is distinctly less charming than it sounds.
But all of this comes second to its core functionality – if it offers game-changing cooling, does anyone care what it looks like? Unfortunately, the Klim Wind does little to redeem itself here. The cooling it offers is, frankly, mediocre.
Using our testing laptop, I ran a 15-minute 3DMark stress test with the Wind on its max 1200rpm fan speed, measuring how much the laptop’s temperature changed. It increased from 85F / 29.5C to 120F / 49C, a 35F / 19.5C rise, which is the weakest cooling I’ve seen from any cooling pad I’ve tested, aside from the TopMate C12 Laptop Cooling Pad’s 22.8C.
In light of this, I can’t really recommend the Klim Wind – there are simply too many similarly priced options that will keep your laptop cooler. The best cooling I’ve personally tested comes from the Llano RGB Laptop Cooling Pad, which I can’t recommend highly enough, although its $119.99 / £129.99 (around AU$188.33) price tag won’t suit everyone’s budget.
If value is your biggest priority, the Liangstar Laptop Cooling Pad is a great option; it’s nearly as frosty as the Llano but costs just $19.99 / £20.99 / AU$66.91, which makes it a bit of a bargain in my book.
Klim Wind laptop cooling pad review: price & availability
- Available now
- Retails from $19.97 / £19.97 / AU$49.97
- Wide range of colorways available
The Klim Wind is available from Amazon now. It retails for as little as $19.97 / £19.97 / AU$49.97, which will get you the blue-lit version we tested here. Although it has historically been reduced as low as £14.90 in the UK, this was way back in December 2019, while the price has never been lower stateside, so we’d argue you’re unlikely to get a better price for this now.
If black with blue lighting isn’t your thing, there are plenty of other, pricier colorways to choose from. Including options with red, cyan or green LED lighting, white metal and plastic or even an additional RGB strip, these max out at $29.97 / £29.97 / AU$149.97.
Should I buy the Klim Wind laptop cooling pad?
Buy it if…
Don’t buy it if…
Klim Wind laptop cooling pad review: also consider
How I tested the Klim Wind laptop cooling pad
- Tested over the course of two days
- Recorded how much the product cooled our gaming laptop during a stress test
- Checked the volume of its fans using a sound level meter
I tested the Klim Wind using TechRadar’s standard laptop cooling pad testing process. First off, I used a thermal camera to measure the peak temperature of our Razer Predator Helios 300 with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 testing laptop to establish a baseline. Then I ran a 3DMark stress test on the laptop for 15 minutes with the laptop cooling pad set to maximum speed, before recording its final temperature so I could compare its cooling against other products.
To test the amount of sound it generated, I used a noise level meter to check the combined noise of the cooling pad and the laptop’s fans. I took two measurements, one from a few inches away and one from my head height (21 inches away) to get a sense of the absolute and subjective noise levels the device makes. I also used the laptop cooling pad in a range of scenarios, from gaming to day to day work to assess how ergonomic and comfortable it was.
I have plenty of experience to help support my testing. Not only have I reviewed a wide range of laptop cooling pads for TechRadar, I’ve also been a creative and an avid gamer for years, meaning I’m familiar with the struggle of trying to keep a laptop cool during very CPU-intensive tasks.
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josh.russell@futurenet.com (Josh Russell)
