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Cooler Master NotePal U3 Plus review: Modular and powerful
June 24, 2025
Cooler Master NotePal U3 Plus
What we like
What we don’t like
There are many types of laptops. However, gaming laptops are the biggest culprit for overheating. They have the strongest CPUs in the laptop space along with powerful GPUs. Both work really hard when gaming and it’s hard to keep them cool in the process. Some laptop coolers work for your everyday tasks and they’re fine. It takes something a little extra to work with gaming laptops and that is what Cooler Master was going for with the NotePal U3 Plus. Here is our review to see if it works.
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What is the Cooler Master NotePal U3 Plus?
The three 80mm fans are where things get interesting. You can actually move them. In fact, you can remove them entirely, move them to where you want, and seat them into place there. The USB plug is attached to the metal frame with a clip so you customize its placement. The clip also contains the fan control slider and USB pass-through. It also fit my 17.3-inch laptop without difficulty. Cooler Master’s claims that it fits 19-inch laptops is a bit suspect, though.
The design is otherwise simple. The metal portion is literally just a sheet of metal with some grating drilled into it. It curls around at the back and holds itself up. You can’t adjust the tilt at all, but the tilt is at a reasonable angle so it should work for most people. The rubber accents effectively help keep the laptop from sliding.
The execution of the design is a bit sloppy and it’s mostly because of the cooler’s modular approach. It’s difficult to hide cables and make everything look pretty when you can remove half of the device from the other half of the device. However, the NotePal U3 Plus makes up for it with its high degree of customization, a feature most laptop coolers don’t have.
How to set up and use the Cooler Master NotePal U3 Plus?
Otherwise, it functions like any other laptop cooler. You place your laptop on the metal grating and clip the cooler’s USB cable close to one of your USB ports. Plug in the cooler to make it run. The clip has the fan speed controls in the form of a wheel. The USB pass-through is connected to the plug. Trust us, you can’t miss it. Set the fans to the speeds you want and then use your laptop as normal.
How well does the Cooler Master NotePal U3 Plus perform?
We ran a total of four tests with the Cooler Master NotePal U3 Plus:
The laptop was set to Windows Balanced for all tests with no modifications. The laptop cooler was at its maximum setting for the highest amount of cooling. The temperatures were recorded and double checked with HWMonitor, ASUS Armoury Crate, and Intel XTU.
Without further delay, here are the results of the tests.
The results were among the best of any laptop cooler we tested. Most laptops take additional thermal headroom as an excuse to run harder with higher CPU clock speeds. It happened during my testing, but the NotePal U3 Plus still managed to drag down temperatures by nearly 10C on all tests while also keeping the fan speed down in nearly all instances. It kept the CPU 0.5-0.7Ghz higher during the CPU stress test while also maintaining an 8C temperature drop. That’s an excellent result.
The only knock is the GPU temperatures. It only knocked off 2C on average during heavy gaming, but it also kept the temperatures from spiking, resulting in a 5C difference overall. In short, the NotePal U3 Plus definitely cools down laptops well.
What I liked about the Cooler Master NotePal U3 Plus
What I didn’t like about the Cooler Master NotePal U3 Plus
Is the Cooler Master NotePal U3 Plus good?
Read next:The best laptops you can buy in 2020
There are some drawbacks. The fans could’ve been more powerful and this thing is quite expensive at $69.99. Still, the pros outweigh the cons by a fairly hefty margin and this thing should cool all but the most stubborn laptops by a measurably good amount. It’s an easy recommendation as long as you don’t mind the price and the design cons.
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