I’ve had issues with my laptop overheating during gaming sessions. It just had insufficient cooling for the processor and hard drive. So I started looking for a simple solution. The best and easiest is a cooling lap pad for the laptop to sit on. After shopping around I settled on the Thermaltake Massive23 LX. This is my review of it.
The Thermaltake Massive23 LX lives up to it’s name with a substantial feel. The aluminum and plastic body has great build quality with no rough or sharp edges. The black anodized finish of the aluminum looks great and should hold up to a lot of abuse. It has cool looking blue LED lighting, but that seems unnecessary. Thankfully Thermaltake is nice enough to include a separate on/off button for it, so you can turn the light off without turning off the fan.
Even though the Massive23 uses light-weight aluminum and plastic, it is still a fairly heavy pad. That can make it a little uncomfortable to use over a long period of time, but for normal use, an hour or so at a time, it’s not a problem. It has no sharp edges on it, the Massive23 won’t dig into you, unlike some other – cheaper – cooling pads do. Both lap contacting areas are large, have rounded edges, and are plastic, so it sits fairly comfortably on your lap.
The Massive23 includes two USB ports, one is used to connect the pad to the laptop, the other is used as a pass-through so you don’t actually lose access to a port when using the pad. I wish it included more USB ports, making it a USB hub in addition to a cooling pad. I can never have enough USB ports. It’s also a “plug and play” solution, there are no drivers to install or software to setup.
There’s a few minor things I don’t like. The non-slip pads are a bit on the small side and don’t match up well with my laptop. If they were larger and square I think they would work much better, my laptop doesn’t move around much but larger pads would keep it locked in place. The vent holes on the bottom side are bigger than they probably need to be and it’s easy to stick your fingers through them into the fan. I have large, sausage like fingers and I can easily poke them through. This shouldn’t be much of a problem because the handles on the sides give you no reason to reach under and grab, but it could come up. The included USB cable is too long for my tastes. I understand why it has to be long, Thermaltake has to cover all kinds of situations with all kinds of laptop layouts, but I’ll be replacing the cable with a shorter one as soon as I can find one.
The Massive23 uses a humongous 230mm fan to keep the fresh air moving. The fan runs at a fairly low RPM, making it pretty quiet, it’s inaudible over the sound of my laptop’s own CPU fan and hard drive. It makes up for the low speed by having a ton of large blades, so the fan still manages to move a lot of air. The air flow really helps to keep things cool.
Cooling Performance – Normal Use
To get the cooling performance of this cooler I started with the laptop sitting directly on my lap while doing some browsing, emailing, tweeting, Excelling, and other basic productivity tasks, the laptop wasn’t working very hard. I kept tabs on the temperature using an infrared thermometer in two areas, one near the CPU vents and another where the hard drive is located. Once they reached a point where the high temps leveled off (117.1° for CPU and 117.6° for HD, all temps in Fahrenheit), I put the cooler under the laptop and turned on the fan. I then took temp readings every two minutes and thirty seconds for thirty minutes.

Temperature drop over 30 minutes.
Over the last ten minutes my CPU had an average temperature of 92.7° and the hard drive had an average temp of 99.4°. The low temps were 90.3° and 98.6°. These are pretty significant drops, about -24° for the CPU and -18° for the HD, over just 30 minutes. It shows that the Massive23 does move a ton of air and that really helps keep things cool.
Cooling Performance – Full Load
I started up SiSoftware’s Sandra Lite benchmark utility and ran a processor and hard drive burn-in test twice for 45 minutes each time. The first time with the laptop sitting directly on my lap, the second time with the Massive23 under it and the fan running. I let it run for 15 minutes to get the temps up. After the initial warm up I then checked temps every five minutes. At the end of each test I graphed and also averaged the temps.
Under full load for 45 minutes, without the Massive23 my laptop’s CPU temperature peaked at 130.2° and averaged 125° across the seven temperature samples I took. The hard drive peaked at 123.9° and averaged 119.4° over the samples. With the Massive23 under my laptop, those numbers dropped considerably with the CPU peaking at 106.4° and averaging 100.5° while the HDD peaked at 106.7° and averaged 100.7°. So a 20° difference of the averages between with and without the cooler is pretty impressive to me.
Final Thoughts
The Massive23 LX is a perfect fit for 15″ laptops, a bit on the small side for 17″, and too big for 13″, it’ll still work for those sizes though. It’s a comfortable and quiet cooler that does an excellent job. I used to have problems with my laptop overheating and shutting down during long gaming sessions, those issues have now disappeared. I like the Thermaltake Massive23 LX and would recommend it to anybody that asks.
![]()
Recommended





