Colorful launches the P16 Pro Starwind, its first gaming laptop with an external liquid cooling dock
Colorful has presented the P16 Pro Starwind Water-Cooled Edition 2026a gaming laptop designed to work alongside an external liquid cooling dock. It is the first time that the Chinese brand has proposed this approach in one of its laptops, combining an Intel Core Ultra 7 251HX processor with a GeForce RTX 5060 Laptop GPU.
The system debuts the Starwind S1 dock, a dedicated accessory that circulates coolant through the laptop’s chassis while the internal fans slow down. Colorful plans to start sales in China on August 28.
300 Hz screen and a 16 GB memory configuration
The P16 Pro Starwind mounts a 16-inch IPS panel with 2560 x 1600 resolutiona 300 Hz refresh rate and 500 nits of maximum brightnessplus full coverage of the sRGB color space. Colorful accompanies it 16 GB of DDR5-5600 memory and a 1 TB PCIe 4.0 SSD.
In terms of autonomy and power, the equipment integrates a 60 Wh battery and uses a 280 W GaN charger. The thickness remains at 19.9 mm and the total weight is around 2.05 kg, figures that seek to maintain a certain portability despite the hardware it incorporates.
The cooling system combines two fans and five heatpipes with a liquid cooling circuit integrated into the chassis itself. According to Colorful, this configuration allows up to 150 W of combined performance to be achieved using exclusively air cooling, without the need to connect the dock.
This is precisely where the Starwind S1 comes into play.: When plugged in, the coolant begins to circulate inside the laptop and the integrated fans lower their rotation speed, reducing the noise perceived during intense workloads without sacrificing temperatures.
Core Ultra 7 251HX and RTX 5060, the couple chosen for this team
For this edition, Colorful has opted for the Intel Core Ultra 7 251HXa processor from the high-performance family for laptops that Intel reserves for computers with higher thermal and consumption needs. Combine it with a GeForce RTX 5060 Laptop GPUthe laptop variant of NVIDIA’s high-access range within the RTX 50 series, designed to move current titles in native resolution without relying excessively on scaling technologies.
This combination partly explains the commitment to such an elaborate cooling system. The more watts the CPU and GPU can handle simultaneously, the more room there is to maintain high clock rates during extended gaming sessions, something that thin laptops often sacrifice in favor of portability.
A possible change of manufacturer compared to the conventional P16 Pro
Colorful’s previous P16 Pro, in its air-cooled variant, seems to come from Clevo as an ODM manufacturerwhich would confirm that the brand has already used this supplier at some point in the series. There is no direct confirmation about the origin of this new liquid-cooled edition, although most gaming laptops that use this type of external system are usually based on Tongfang platforms.
Several Western brands that market laptops with external liquid cooling turn to that same Taiwanese manufacturer. This is the case of XMG with its NEO 16 or Eluktronics with the HYDROC-16, while Dream Machines even directly identifies its equivalent models as barebones of the Tongfang X6 series. This practice of reusing the same base chassis under different brands is common in the niche gaming laptop sector, where the volume of units does not always justify the development of one’s own platform from scratch.
Colorful places the price of the P16 Pro Starwind Water-Cooled Edition at approximately 1,710 dollars at the current exchange rate, which would be equivalent to about 1,570 euros applying the direct conversion.
For now, confirmed availability is limited to the Chinese market. Colorful has not detailed whether it plans to bring this model with a liquid cooling dock to other regions, something common in niche configurations before considering international expansion.
External liquid cooling docks for laptops continue to be a minority product in any manufacturer’s catalogalmost always limited to very specific series and to a public willing to carry an additional accessory in exchange for lower temperatures. The arrival of Colorful in this field expands the list of brands that explore the formula, until now dominated by projects linked to Tongfang platforms and marketed under different Western brands.
It remains to be seen if Colorful maintains this variant as a one-time product focused on the Chinese market or if it ends up becoming a recurring line within its P16 Pro laptop catalog, in a segment where cooling continues to be one of the main selling points compared to the competition.
