Performance

Placing a 15.4 inch notebook on the Gemini, it becomes apparent that it is just a tad bit smaller than the notebook itself. An Acer Aspire mainstream notebook is used for testing the cooling performance. This one uses a single core Pentium M and has a few years of actual use under the hood. It is the perfect candidate for a notebook to be cooled and fits the requirements of the Akasa Gemini.

The Acer has two temperature diodes. One is located at the CPU and one at the hard drive. The resulting temperatures can be read and displayed with various applications in Windows. The states were read out in idle, while the notebook was just sitting there. The notebook was placed on the desk, without the use of the Akasa Gemini. Then the portable computer was placed on the notebook cooler and the fans were turned on. After 10 minutes the temperatures were recorded once more.

TPUBench was used to to create a load situation of the notebook and increase the temperature within the unit. The internal cooling fan actually started spinning as fast as possible, trying to keep the internals cool.



As you can see the difference of temperature is not great. Just a few mere degrees. The two fans of the Akasa Gemini simply do not push a lot of air. Even without a notebook on the unit, the air flow can barely be felt through the openings. It is not strong enough to dissipate a lot of heat. In other words the unit seems to be overburdened with the task. It would have been a lot better if Akasa would have added stronger, possibly larger fans.