Gaming Laptop Performance Tested – Laptop Stand vs Desk vs BLANKET!

Have you ever wondered how much more performance you could be getting from your gaming laptop if you used a laptop stand instead of resting on a desk – or worse a soft surface like your bed, lap or sofa? I have, and since I have what I think is the prime candidate to test with this, the Asus Zephyrus M16, and a laptop stand, let’s take a look!

Gaming laptops are power hungry beasts – they can be kicking out 200 or 300 watts of heat from insanely slim chassis, and since their performance is dependent on how cool they are, they need to eject that heat somehow. Most gaming laptops use the same sort of configuration – dual fans that draw relatively cool air in from the bottom and eject it out the sides (including towards the display). This works pretty well – except when it doesn’t. See much like the 2022 F1 cars, the amount of ground clearance they have plays a huge role in how the aerodynamics work. In both the F1 car and laptop’s case, you actually don’t want them to be completely flat to the surface – in F1 you do want minimal ground clearance whereas the laptop is happy with anything above its minimum. Either way, the amount of ground clearance the laptop has determines how much air it can draw in – too little space and the fans won’t be able to draw enough air in to blast out over the heatsinks.

So, how does a machine like this fair with miles of space up on a stand, versus the few millimetres of its feet, versus smothered by a blanket? Let’s take a look! I’ll start with the CPU results, where surprisingly, at least in Cinebench R23 multi-threaded, there really isn’t much difference. The blanket only knocks around 1% off of the lifted result, and the desk vs stand numbers are within a percent too. That’s strange as I would have thought that having literally no space to draw air in would hurt the performance!

Looking at Blender and the BMW scene though, now we start to see a difference. The desk and stand results are the same at just over two minutes, with the blanket run around 5% down, or about 7 seconds slower. But the real kicker, that’s the Gooseberry scene. The open-air approach from the stand nets just shy of 30 seconds off the “conventional” desk result, and the soft-surface run is nearly 100 seconds further back. For reference, the stand result is 17.5% faster than the blanket run. That’s crazy – and I think is the key to the issue here.

In general, heatsinks don’t just immediately wick every joule of heat away, it gets transferred from the CPU or GPU into the plate, then into a heatpipe, then out into the heatsink fins, then finally into the air the fan is forcing though. That process takes time, and equally at low temperature differentials – ie the ambient air isn’t much hotter than the metal of the heatsink – the heat will often just stay in the metal, rather than exit into the air. Think of a sponge soaking up water. The sponge can hold a certain amount of water, and if you are just drip-feeding it water it’ll just soak it up until it gets too full and will start shedding some of the excess. This thermal mass is what slows those temperature shifts down, and is also why on shorter workloads like Cinebench, and to some extent the BMW scene in Blender, even when suffocated by a blanket, the laptop had little difficulty performing to its best. But, on a longer render like the Gooseberry scene, when the CPU ends up outputting more heat than the heatsink can soak up, the performance starts to suffer.

Ok, that’s great, but what about gaming? Well here’s the fun thing, it’s the same story. In CSGO the stand nets around 25 FPS more than running on the desk, or just shy of 6% faster. However, running on a soft surface cuts that performance by 50 FPS. That puts the lifted result 21% ahead by comparison, which is a pretty big swing.

Cyberpunk shows a much closer result from lifted and flat, functionally identical actually, with only the blanket dropping performance. It’s worth noting that while I did run the benchmark multiple times to heat soak each setup evenly, it is a very short test so is less likely to be affected by thermal throttling. Still, the lifted and flat results come out at 11% faster than the soft-surface run which is impressive.

Watch Dogs legion shows a pretty slight improvement having your machine lifted here, only by around 1 FPS higher, although again the soft-surface run drops just under 10 FPS by comparison. Shadow of the Tomb Raider though makes it bang-on 10 FPS less, with the stand offering nearly 13% more performance. Even the 1% low performance suffers by around 8 FPS – although interestly again the on-desk result is functionally the same as the on-stand data.

Finally in Fortnite, the standing and desk results trade blows, with again the blanket culling this time a full 20 FPS off of both the average and 1% low performance. That’s pretty huge, and means the other results run around 17% faster. 17% more performance from just using your laptop on a desk instead of a sofa! That’s how much performance you’d expect to get from a decent upgrade, let alone just lifting the damn thing up!

Ok, so unsurprisingly when the laptop has little way to draw in air, it’s performance suffers. Often by a considerable margin, upwards of 20% in the gaming results, and similar in CPU tests too. What I didn’t expect was the functional lack of a difference between running on a desk and using a laptop stand. Although thinking about it, it kinda makes sense. See Asus will have designed this with the Z height they’ve set in mind. If they knew they could get a considerable amount more performance by lifting the laptop an extra millimetre or two they would ship it like that, so the maximum amount of air the fans can actually move is going to be tuned based on how much air they expect the machine to have around it. Lifting it up and giving it more air than it can make use of doesn’t end up helping much. Still, for the off chance you can eke out some extra performance, maybe consider propping your gaming laptop up a little next time you are gaming – and whatever you do don’t game on a soft surface like a bed or a blanket.