Use

Using the miniNinja II does not require any assembly at all. Simply place the notebook on the unit and connect them both using the USB to miniUSB cable. It is actually quite long - too long for most scenarios.

Performance

To check the performance of the mini Ninja II, we used an aging Acer Aspire notebook. It comes with a single core Pentium M processor and tends to heat up quite nicely, even during light use. To supply power to the Ninja HS, we use one of the notebook's USB 2.0 ports, which is conveniently located right above the notebook cooler.

We have taken four measurements for this review. The temperatures were first recorded without the additional notebook cooler. Results were noted at idle and under full load. Then the unit was placed on the mini Ninja II and the temperatures were recorded in the same fashion once more.


As the graphs above show, the mini Ninja II cools the notebook around the CPU quite nicely. Four degrees reduced temperatures by a notebook cooler is quite a good result, many other coolers won't drop the internal temperature at all. The hard drive however, is not really reaping much of the benefit, as it is located toward the lower left of the notebook. The slight decrease in temperature of the hard drive can be attributed to the cooler surroundings of the drive within the Acer notebook chassis.