Summary: Tacens sent us a really compact notebook cooler this time. After having reviewed the Tacens Fero I was eager to test something more portable, which could fit in my notebook bag. This first attempt at a portable notebook cooler by Tacens, does however leave me wanting more.

Tacens is a young company, they started their business in 2005, but they have grown quickly and taken their place in the computer accessory market. Some of their new products this season are their notebook coolers; Fero, Trio and Fero Light. Three different approaches to the same problem; high heat emitting laptops.

INTRODUCTION

After having reviewed the Tacens Fero, it is time to take a closer look at the much smaller Trio. The Trio wants to be an efficient and quiet notebook cooler, the keywords are portability and lightness, something that clearly separates it from its big brother Fero.

My first impressions of the Trio were good, I liked the different angles and forms it can take. Let’s look at the specifications:

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

We recognize the design of the box from the other Tacens products we have reviewed. It goes in black and white, with descriptions of the product in seven languages.

Inside the box we found the Trio protected by bubble plastic. In addition to the product itself, we found the the cable and a simple manual that describes the function of the Trio.

IN DETAIL: TACENS TRIO

Like the Tacens Fero, the Trio is made of plastic ABS with a leather finishing which adds to its smoothness and style.

The Tacens Trio has two hinges fastened to the central triangle that allows it to adopt several different positions. It’s the versatility of the Trio that allows it to take different forms and have different functions. When the cooler is unfolded it can be used as a notebook cooler and when it’s unfolded it can be used as an ordinary desktop fan. There is no great mystery on how to use this product as a desktop fan, just connect it to an USB port an put the fan on you desk in a position you like and there you go.

However, the main purpose of the Tacens Trio is to work as a laptop cooler. So let’t take a look at the most important characteristics of the Trio. The Tacens Trio is built around two Tacens Dawn Pro 60mm fans, identical to the fans on the Tacens Fero. The Tacens Fero however, has four if these quiet fans.

The underside of the Trio is not much to talk about. It has some rubber anti-slippers to secure it to the surface it is placed upon. It also has drop down lifters which you can see on the picture below, to enable a higher angle and some ergonomics. Compared to the four settings available on the Tacens Fero, this is not much and leaves us stuck with only two possible positions with little variation.

The dimensions and small weight are what truly makes the Tacens Trio special. I have never before seen a notebook cooler with these characteristics. It’s light and small and fits in my laptop bag and will become a regular companion on my trips. In spite of its small dimensions, the Trio can be used with bigger laptops as well.

INSTALLATION AND TESTS

The installation of the Tacens Trio only requires you to connect one end of the cable to the connector on the notebook cooler and the other and to a free USB port on your laptop. As simple as that, no extra power adaptor needed.

To realize the actual testing of the Tacens Trio we used a laptop with the following specifications:

• Intel core 2 duo T7300 (2x2Ghz)
• Intel GM965 (Intel X3100)
• Toshiba MK1637GSX (160GB, 5400rpm, 8MB cache)
• Kingston HyperX 5300 CL4 (2x1GB, 4-5-5)

To measure the temperatures, we used the software “Everest 3.5″. We setup two different scenarios; “full load” and “idle”. The full load scenario means we pushed the system to max load for 20 minutes with the software Cinebench 9.5. The idle scenario means we just left the notebook doing nothing at all for 20 minutes, just being idle in Windows XP, which we used as operating system for both scenarios. The results are the shown in the graph below.

As you can see from the graph the values obtained by the Tacens Trio are very poor. We noticed almost no temperature drop at all either at full load or idle mode. It only managed to cool the CPU and HDD one tiny degree (centigrades) during the full load scenario. The most probable reason for the poor cooling performance has to be that the fans maximum rotation speed is only 1500 RPM. Because Tacens did not include a potentiometer, we were not able to boost the speed of the fans which would perhaps have helped the performance a bit.

The noise generated by the Tacens “Dawn Pro” fans is not much to talk about, they are really quiet.

CONCLUSIONS

While Tacens have succeeded in constructing a very portable and quiet notebook cooler, they have failed on its most important characteristics; the cooling performance. I still like the idea of this product, but one can not neglect that the Trio fails to impress me overall, it just doesn’t dissapate heat as much as it should. It scores some points for design and portability but falls short on its cooling performance.

The final score is 60 out of 100 owls.

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Author: Manuel González Fernández

Translator: Vince Emiloz Sanderson