laptop coolers can be very useful depending on the laptop's design. Something like a MacBook or some of the Samsung laptops, among many others, would be useless to have a laptop cooler, as there is nowhere on the bottom (or minimal places on the bottom) for it to pull the air in. In that instance, the fan would do nothing but slightly cool the case perhaps, but nothing more. most laptops pull their air from the bottom though, and if you can force cooler air into those areas, you will notice a difference in temps most particularly under load. I have always run one with my laptop when possible and have noticed that it does a lot more than most people think about. It will help airflow not only to feed the CPU(GPU) radiator with cooler air, but it will also lower temps everywhere else that the air can reach. Monitoring this with HWinfo64 helps confirm that. On my current laptop, I've noticed that at idle the temperatures don't change much from using the cooler...but the temps of my HDD,M-SSD, motherboard, chipset, and nearly everything else that doesn't get much direct airflow is dropped tremendously. Cooler electronics are happier electronics. Furthermore, when I am gaming with it and have the fan set to 100%, load temps drop by about 5-8C on the GPU and about 5C on the CPU with the cooler. If I remove the bottom panel on my laptop(when I know the laptop will stay on my desk for a while) it exposes the entire motherboard and cooling system...this will help temps by another 3-5*C as well.
While I don't think coolers are entirely a must have, I do believe that for the small investment you'll make on one why not buy one if it's feasible for you to use it? they DO help if your laptop is designed in a manner that will benefit from it. if your laptop isn't gonna move much for a while then use it. If you're on the go, simply leave it behind, your laptop will survive.
. cool master pal u1/2/3 is good because you can place where the fans are to where your intakes under your laptop.
