PCSpecialist Recoil 17 R LC Laptop Review

Power, Thermals and Noise

While we usually expect to see a liquid cooler provide lower temperatures, as is normally the case with a liquid cooled desktop PC, the liquid cooler for the Recoil 17 R LC affected things slightly differently. We can see from the higher CPU package power readings that the extra thermal headroom enabled the i9-13900HX to maintain higher power usage during sustained workloads.

The CPU package temperature reflected this higher power usage and meant we actually saw increased temperatures when using liquid to cool the laptop during a Cinebench R23 multicore benchmark. Instead of an accessory to provide better thermals then, the liquid cooling dock is better thought of as a performance tool, unlocking extra power headroom for the CPU to run faster than when on air.

Finally, noise levels were not affected by any substantial amount when using either air or liquid to cool the Recoil 17 R LC, with the noise either coming from the laptop itself or from the cooling unit, depending on which was being used.

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