Hey all, I’ve read a bit about people being curious about the 980M and how hot it runs, so I decided to try it out on my GT72. While I was at it, I thought I should give the Cooler Boost feature a go at the same time… What I did was to run a looping benchmark (Resident Evil 6) for about 15 minutes, and let Afterburner run in the background, logging temperatures, recording the maximum. I did also crank up the core frequency by a full 135MHz, resulting in a peak boost frequency of 1261MHz on the GPU. The memory was clocked at 5800MHz. First up was the standard fan profile, the GT72 out of the box, if you will. I wish I had a decent way of giving you noise levels as well, but to me, there is obviously noise from the cooling, but it isn’t bad at all. You can easily game without headphones on and not be disturbed by the noise levels. Also, the temperatures stay at a relatively (for notebooks) low 80°C. After that, I did the same run, but with Cooler Boost activated instead. The exact same overclock, benchmark and once more over 15 minutes in RE6. The result is a louder machine as the notebook’s fans spins up to max, but honestly, I found the noise levels non-intrusive for gaming with a headset on. A lot quieter than the GT70, for example. This feature drops the temperatures from the already quite low 80°C peak with a full 6°C to only 74°C, with a full 135MHz GPU overclock. Sure, you won’t want to run with the Cooler Boost activated all day, but for those toasty LAN parties, where you sit around with a headset anyway, I can see the point. Tests were conducted with a 22°C ambient temperature in the Resident Evil 6 benchmark at 1080P, high settings for 15 minutes.
