14 ms·

Cooling off your Raspberry Pi 4

272 points by alexellisuk 7y ago

tmikaeld 7y ago
A model, temperature, noise, price - summary table would have been nice.
- kingosticks 7y ago
  And size, that ice tower thing is huge. I'd prefer the heat sink case, which I've anecdotally heard does a great job.
tpmx 7y ago
I guess Raspberry Pi 3 B+ (or CM3+) was close to the sweetspot in terms of thermal management vs performance tradeoffs, for many applications. Unless you really need more RAM or higher USB speed. I hope the next two main steps for the next Raspberry Pi (4+ or 5?) and the corresponding compute module will be: a) including a SATA controller (SD cards are not... ideal.) b) a more power-efficent node
- imglorp 7y ago
  Also, if your job allows, you can grab a stack and spread the load out among them. I call such a Pi stack a "bakery".
  - tpmx 7y ago
    Ok.
- timw4mail 7y ago
  Really the 3B was probably the sweet spot. The 3B+ still benefits considerably from a heat sink.
  - tpmx 7y ago
    The compute modules have a different behaviour: We're using the CM3+ on carrier boards. It's substantially better in terms of thermal performance than the CM3.
- sorenjan 7y ago
  I don't think a SATA controller makes sense for them. Keeping the price low is an important design goal, and adding more chips goes against that. An external hard drive with USB3 is probably the best option for a while.
  - tpmx 7y ago
    I'd start looking at actual volume prices for controller chips first, before dismisssing this, but that's just me. I have no idea what the cost is, but I could imagine it to be like maybe 5-10 cents by now. Just a guess. It's that kind of old but still very useful tech by now.
    - tpmx 7y ago
      Btw: Since we needed to interface to SATA reliably via USB (from a raspi CM.) We ended up identifying a particular Taiwan-designed JMicron-based SATA/USB2 controller that worked really reliably with Linux, unlike, say every single PRC-designed SATA/USB2 controller chip we tested. It was a pretty painful experience going through all of that testing. We bought 120 retail packages of that JMicron-based product, directly from the Taiwanese producer, just to be sure, to guarantee our first-gen production run. I think many RasPi users want a reliably high-speed, low-cost storage device. It doesn't make much sense for all of these users to have go through this very annoying process. It should just work. Since the chip cost for this by now is likely very small in the raspi kind of volume, why not?
    - nlfwhulsdhouv 7y ago
      Nothing of that complexity is 5-10c in volume (even huge volumes). I would guess somewhere in the 1-2$ range, which _is_ a big issue for them. For reference, 5-10c won't even buy you a middle to low performance op-amp. The Pi became possible because of integration, where the SoC supported all the required interfaces internally so very few external ICs were required. That's what allows them to keep the price so low. Additional chips add significant additional cost. That's why there have always been compromises like the USB-connected ethernet. They can only do what the SoC supports natively.
- adontz 7y ago
  I'd rather welcome onboard bootable MMC.
  - tpmx 7y ago
    That would certainly be a way for the foundation to go all Apple, with 3-4 different storage amount levels. I don't like it. Caveat: I think it makes sense that all RPI5 boards (except the lite Compute Modules) would have like 8-16GB onboard flash, via eMMC. If it makes sense, economically speaking. I think it could. The SD card aspect of the RPI sucks in so many ways.
    - izacus 7y ago
      Except that MMC versions of RPi already exist and it didn't really bring the world down. They're also significantly more reliable due to lack of horrible SD cards.
      - tpmx 7y ago
        Those MMC versions are called RPI compute modules. They didn't "bring the world down" because they required a separate board for them to be mounted on.
- OJFord 7y ago
  With the 4 you can use a USB3-SATA. I don't know if it can boot from a USB device though?
  - Namidairo 7y ago
    I believe the plan was for it to support USB boot in the future, since they can update the bootloader. So not yet.
  - dunnevens 7y ago
    You almost can. Needs an SD card with /boot but the rest of the OS can reside on the external drive.
jrockway 7y ago
I got a 5V Noctua fan and use this enclosure: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3723481 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3723481 Seems to stay very cool and is silent. Noctua makes some good fans.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  It needs a 5V fan, right? You power it from the GPIO pins directly?
  - jrockway 7y ago
    Yeah, exactly.
FullyFunctional 7y ago
I have tried many options (including powerful fans), but the Flirc case [1] (whole-case passive heat sink) is my favority so far and cools well enough for a 1.75 GHz overclock under torture testing (2+ GHz would crash under torture). [1] https://flirc.tv/more/raspberry-pi-4-case https://flirc.tv/more/raspberry-pi-4-case (I'm not affiliated, just a content customer).
- mizzack 7y ago
  Been a fan of those Flirc cases for a while. They do a good job and look/feel top quality.
- driverdan 7y ago
  How do you use that with a GPIO cable?
  - skraelingjar 7y ago
    There is a small gap between the bottom plastic and metal body you should be able to get a ribbon cable through but I haven't tried it on mine.
- int_19h 7y ago
  There is an even better take on the whole-case heat sink concept, although it gets pricey: https://wickedaluminum.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-standard-case-with-heat-dissipation https://wickedaluminum.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-standard-...
  - FpUser 7y ago
    Beauty
  - IshKebab 7y ago
    Quite ugly if you ask me!
  - blacksmith_tb 7y ago
    Might as well go all the way to AstroPi[1] at that rate. Though I wonder if Flir couldn't make a copper-top version for less money than either, really... 1: https://makezine.com/2015/12/01/raspberry-pi-iss/ https://makezine.com/2015/12/01/raspberry-pi-iss/
georgeecollins 7y ago
The problem for me is I attach a card to the top of the Pi for robot circuitry. That makes putting a heat sink or fan on the board awkward. I feel like having to do this really compromises the versatility of the Pi. For now I am sticking to 3s until I hear the temp issue is solved.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  Is placing the card on top a must, or can you do side by side with a 40-pin jumper cable?
  - georgeecollins 7y ago
    You can do that, but many boards are really designed to sit on top of the card. In a robot that walks you don't have that much space and you want to mount everything as firmly as possible to avoid a bad connection from repeated vibrations. It is possible but so far it hasn't seem worth the hassle.
- opencl 7y ago
  The Pi 3 has the same thermal throttling issue as the 4, and the 4's performance under throttled conditions is much higher. Though IMO even calling it an issue is overblown, most phones and laptops cannot maintain their peak clocks under load for extended periods of time either. Intel calls it turbo boost so it's a feature instead of a bug.
  - georgeecollins 7y ago
    Really? Because I run a Pi with a servo board on top that gets quite hot (too hot to touch) and it seems like CPU is performing time sensitive calculations (walking kinematics) adequately. It could be that the calculations are simple enough that they are insensitive to the throttling down. Do you have a suggestion how I could write some Python code to check if the 3 is throttling down? (Maybe a link to an example?) Maybe it wouldn't be an issue on the Pi 4 that I think it is. In that case I have been holding back on switching to a 4 for no good reason. This is very helpful, thank you.
m4r35n357 7y ago
+1 for the heatsink case! [yes I have one]
- aelo 7y ago
  I also bought this one because I wanted a passive solution. Temperature looks fine (45°C in Idle). Although I think there are different versions and some of them don't fit perfectly on the RPi4. I got mine from amazon and it cools the three most important chips but the position where it touches the chips isn't perfect.
- chewyland 7y ago
  Same. Passive cooling works great and the heatsink is also a case. Dead quiet and no throttling. I'm using as a media center with my cheap 75 inch TV.
gatherhunterer 7y ago
I just put my stack of Pis in front of a Noctua NF-S12A and it cools them all very effectively, even under heavy load, without the need for any goofy hardware that blocks additions like the GPIO extender or any other HATs I may want to add. I bought an adapter to power it from one of the Pis. It’s an easy solution that works for many of them with negligible effort.
MaXtreeM 7y ago
The article is basically just a list of some options. Even for the most advanced option the author writes just about temperautures in "mostly idle" setup. Anyone has a link to an article with actual measurements?
- TheGallopedHigh 7y ago
  Yeah I was rather disappointed as well. Could have run the same benchmark over some length of time recording the temp at intervals to see which is the best cooling option.
- h2odragon 7y ago
  this is good: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-4-might-not-need-fan-anymore https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-4-might-...
- gbraad 7y ago
  lacking test under load make this not a very good article.
- ageofwant 7y ago
  Here's a nice summary video as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa3YnWhzPsw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa3YnWhzPsw
  - read_if_gay_ 7y ago
    Another: https://youtu.be/AVfvhEJ9XD0 https://youtu.be/AVfvhEJ9XD0
schappim 7y ago
Disclaimer: I work for a company that owns a Raspberry Pi Approved Reseller. We spend a ridiculous amount of money testing various cases from China. In testing we found that the heat sink style[1] cases with fan work best. Having said that, for most use cases you just need to move the hot layer of air away from the SoC, so even a low speed fan will do the trick. [1] https://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/collections/cases-enclosures/products/armour-case-with-dual-cooling-fan-for-raspberry-pi https://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/collections/cases-enclo...
- GhettoMaestro 7y ago
  Thanks for posting this. I am deploying a few Pis in a hot environment and am now looking into the cooling issue.
- phkahler 7y ago
  Is it possible that a taller case with vents at bottom and top, plus a decent heat sink might provide enough convection to go fanless?
  - schappim 7y ago
    Certainly, the key is hot air needs to be able to get away from the SoC. For my home lab, I don't bother with the fans/cases and instead just stack the Pis with brass spacers. I haven't had any issues yet with the ambient room temperature around 20-22ºC (68-71.6ºF for the stonecutters who keep the metric system down[1]). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZI_aEalijE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZI_aEalijE
    - colechristensen 7y ago
      Have you checked if the CPUs are throttling at load?
      - bitwize 7y ago
        I use a Pimoroni case with an open bit where the CPU and various other chips are. I also have a small heatsink on the CPU. The machine doesn't throttle under load even when I hammer it with a compilation job on all four cores.
luc_ 7y ago
Yes, I know what a heatsink is and how to google for heatsinks for a RPi. TYVM.
jascii 7y ago
"The heat will be spread out, but not moved away from the device, so once it's hot, it will likely radiate that heat around the board." The author doesn't seem to grasp the concept of convective cooling or how heatsinks are supposed to work.
- GhostVII 7y ago
  I think that comment was in contrast to what they said about the fan: > This option does apply a decent amount of cooling at idle and under load, it also moves the heat away from the board unlike the heatsink. I think the comment makes sense with that context, compared to a fan, the heat from a heatsink will stay near the board and make future cooling less efficient.
  - OJFord 7y ago
    But with or without a fan, the point of a heatsink is to increase surface area for convection. A fan also aids convection, but instead by maintaining a larger temperature difference between the surface (however large) and the surrounding air. Either alone is good; both together are better.
lordnacho 7y ago
Here's a fun thing I just did with my RPI4. I've got "watch -n 1 vcgencmd measure_temp" running. Equilibrium temp is arount 73C running a realtime website. Take a £2 coin and place it on the CPU. Temp drops 10C within seconds. I can get it under 60C by swapping a second coin. They stay pretty hot after you take them off. Also the equilibrium temp when you just leave the coin there seems to be a good few degrees less than with no coin. Possible the larger surface area helps remove the heat, just not as good as an actually designed heatsink.
- esotericn 7y ago
  Yep. I bought my rpi4 in store and picked up a few tiny heatsinks from an electronics store for about 70p. I just rested them on top of the chip, no compound, no glue. Definitely reduced throttling before I could get a proper heatsink shipped. A few quids increases the surface area quite a lot!
- bArray 7y ago
  I think that's called "throwing money at the problem"! Taping the coin (or heat sink) down should give you better heat transfer, therefore better cooling. Designing your own case in OpenSCAD and 3D printing is a piece of cake, building a large fan into the case (lower noise) is a nice weekend project.
  - Mtinie 7y ago
    This sounds like a job for the trusty denizen of the homebuilt computer builder’s toolbox, thermal paste!
  - jagged-chisel 7y ago
    A bit of thermal paste between the chip and the coin would also help with heat transfer
    - lostlogin 7y ago
      Paste between coins with a stacking arrangement going big-small-big-small etc so that there was a semblance of fins would be interesting.
esotericn 7y ago
I have the ICE tower with mad LEDs! 'cos I'm a little boy inside. Stable 33% overclock, I'm typing to you from it now. :D $ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_max_freq 2000000 pic: https://files.esotericnonsense.com/pub/rpi-tower.jpg https://files.esotericnonsense.com/pub/rpi-tower.jpg
- glouwbug 7y ago
  Do you use it as your desktop machine? This is fascinating
  - esotericn 7y ago
    Yes. I run Arch on it. Firefox, youtube, etc are full speed and very usable. I do have an x86 laptop which I use on the go, and a server that I SSH in to for heavy loading like compilation etc.
    - dunnevens 7y ago
      Does Arch fix screen tearing? The Pi4 Raspian desktop has a strong problem with that.
      - opan 7y ago
        Running Wayland would probably do the trick.
- barsonme 7y ago
  Same with the ICE tower and 2GHz overclock. Even with stress tests I can't get the Pi to break 50 C. I don't use mine as a desktop yet, though. I just run 8 Docker containers for stuff like DNS, Time Machine backup, etc. The goofy-looking Pi: https://www.ericlagergren.com/share/d9htGfiETJHN3ua https://www.ericlagergren.com/share/d9htGfiETJHN3ua
  - esotericn 7y ago
205guy 7y ago
I'm no expert, but one of the blogs I read had detailed posts about putting a heatsink and fan on a RPi3B+ and using it as a desktop and dev machine: https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2018/09/raspberry-pi-3b-flirc-case-thermals-and.html https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2018/09/raspberry-pi-3b-flirc-ca... https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2018/09/project-pi3bdesk-making-even-better.html https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2018/09/project-pi3bdesk-making-...
yellowapple 7y ago
Has anyone tried immersion cooling (i.e. submerging an RPi in mineral oil)? Tempted to try it myself; just need some spare time (that I don't squander by commenting on Hacker News ;) ).
- Sendotsh 7y ago
  Yes it has been done, and works[0-3], it's just a matter of effort vs reward. Generally a simple heat sink and/or small fan setup works fine for nearly any usecase the Pi is designed for, and if you really do need to do heavier loads that require that level of effort to cool, then you probably shouldn't be using a Pi in the first place. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJRrGCqG9Jc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJRrGCqG9Jc [1] https://hackaday.com/2018/08/13/oil-immersed-raspberry-pi-keeps-its-cool-under-heavy-loads/ https://hackaday.com/2018/08/13/oil-immersed-raspberry-pi-ke... [2] https://hackaday.com/2017/05/15/liquid-cooling-overclocked-raspberry-pi-with-style/ https://hackaday.com/2017/05/15/liquid-cooling-overclocked-r... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/bmeklj/pi_immersion_cooling/ https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/bmeklj/pi_imm... If it's just for fun, then I think water-cooling Pi's looks way more interesting to play with: http://finniss.net/water-cooled-raspberry-pi/ http://finniss.net/water-cooled-raspberry-pi/ https://modmymods.com/modmymods-raspberry-pi-mini-water-cooling-kit-mod-0171.html https://modmymods.com/modmymods-raspberry-pi-mini-water-cool...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mrlambchop 7y ago
Having recently built a picade with a Pi4 and ran it in a cool room for around 2 hours, the device kept crashing when playing various emulators. After the final crash, it didn't start up again. Opening up the back was like opening the door to an oven and the Pi4 was just steaming. Nothing was obviously melted, but it didn't work again :(
- darkmighty 7y ago
  This seems conflicting with what I read about its behavior. It should heavily throttle (underclock) itself, but shouldn't destroy itself. Maybe you got a defective unit or the hot thermal environments caused issues elsewhere (again maybe due to some defect).
  - mrlambchop 7y ago
    Oh, I'm sending it back to be looked at. The hat that comes with the picade doesn't have space for a heatsink or fan under it (as the instructions are put together to assemble it) so I'm also suspecting that its early doors for the Pi4 and picade still.
  - colechristensen 7y ago
    I had a power supply with similar problems which actually started on fire - I had been restarting it repeatedly after it kept (supposably) hitting thermal or some other shutdown condition. Lesson: just because there are protections for going past limits doesn't mean that everything is fine when you are constantly hitting them. (applicable to our current government problems sadly)
  - dannyw 7y ago
    There's only so much throttling it can do. If there really was zero ventilation and ambient temps were hot, components can start melting.
  - duxup 7y ago
    Throttle but.... will it shutdown intentionally due to temperature?
derekp7 7y ago
One of my disappointments with the Pi 4 is that the official case for it got rid of any ventilation. Previous cases had vents and a removable top plate. I've found that the Primori fan shim works really good, but only with the cover removed. Will have to try drilling some vent holes in the cover and the back side of the case, and see if I can make it look good.
bakul 7y ago
Note that the main issue here is to avoid cpu throttling due to excessive heat. IIRC you can allow a higher cut-off temp (100ºC instead 77ºC) by setting a config parameter. This will possibly reduce the chip lifespan from whatever it is to decades! But make sure no one can accidentally touch the chip. I have one case with a fan and one case where part of the case body attaches to the chip top with thermal goop. The fan works better.
AceJohnny2 7y ago
So many ad-hoc solutions, but I can't seem to find the maximum power consumption/TDP of the RasPi4, which would inform the kind of dissipation you'd need. Best I could find was the BCM2711 (the Broadcom SoC at the heart of the RasPi4) "datasheet" (a frickin' Word document) [1] that says the board requires a PSU capable of providing 3A at 5V. So that'd be 15W. [1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bcm2711/rpi_DATA_2711_1p0_preliminary.pdf https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...
- fivesixzero 7y ago
  RPi power consumption and power supply is a bit more complicated than it seems on the surface. A large problem is that even “3A rated" supplies suffer large voltage droop under load. This can be seen pretty easily using a cheap USB DC load [0]. As load goes up, voltage tends to drop slowly at first, then heavily at a certain point. Several I’ve bought drop as low as 4.1V at just 2A load which will almost definitely make any Pi very unhappy. I haven’t found an authoritative source but generally the Pi’s power management system starts complaining (flipping the “undervolt since boot” bitflag [1] in “vcgencmd get_throttled”) around 4.6-4.7V [2] To monitor the throttled bitflags, which also report thermal throttling, I wrote a basic shell script that just converts the hex to bin then returns a Grok-ready string with the flags as booleans. I've already got Telegraf on the RPis sending basic host metrics to an InfluxDB instance so that script just gets called by an exec input to generate and persist the data for monitoring or analysis. Eventually I'd love to write (or contribute to) a proper Golang Telegraf plug-in that just reads from the VC mailbox directly but that's still on the back burner. As far as actual power consumption during use, I’ve recently started running tests using a decent USB power meter (WITRN/Qway U2 [3] and X models, in particular) to monitor load over time while running various workloads on a Pi Zero W, a Pi 3B+ and a 4GB Pi 4. Power usage at idle is usually low but even that's unpredictable. Daemons are gonna daemon regardless of the user load. Generally though the load goes up substantially when powering peripherals - Ethernet, USB, BCM VideoCore enc/dec/CSI/SSI, SD card R/W, HDMI, fans, HATs, GPIO peripherals, etc. CPU load definitely factors in heavily, of course, but it’s only part of the picture. For reducing power usage, some surprisingly simple things can help. As a very minor example, shutting off the activity LED [4] can save a few dozen mA. :) [0] https://www.droking.com/Intelligent-USB-Adjustable-Constant-Current-Electronic-Load-DC3-21V-3.5A-35W-Mobile-Power-Detector-Tester-USB-Discharge-Resistance https://www.droking.com/Intelligent-USB-Adjustable-Constant-... [1] https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/48329/undervoltage-warning-despite-decent-power-supply/48337#48337 https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/48329/underv... [2] https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=147781&start=50#p972790 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=1477... [3] https://usbchargingblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/11/web-u2-usb-meter-monitor-upm-quick-look/ https://usbchargingblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/11/web-u2-usb-... [4] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/controlling-pwr-act-leds-raspberry-pi https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/controlling...
echelon 7y ago
What was the last version of Raspberry Pi that didn't require cooling? What's the best-spec'd Pi (or comparable alternative) that doesn't require fans?
- darkmighty 7y ago
  Most don't require cooling, but will have better clocks. The 4 itself throttles under heat (above 60C and heavily over 80C), and seems to have good enough behavior even if not actively cooled.
- watchdogtimer 7y ago
  Probably either the Odroid N2 or HC2 or Nano Pi M4. The one feature all these boards have in common is their CPU is mounted on the _bottom_ of the board, allowing a much larger heat sink to be mounted without obstructing anything. The lack of this feature in on the RPi 4 is a fatal blunder IMHO and why I chose not to buy it. I currently use a Nano Pi M4 as my main desktop computer. It has no active cooling, only a big heatsink which covers the entire rear of the board. As I write this, I have three browser windows open containing a total of 30 tabs while streaming a 44 kHz stereo 128 kbps audio stream. Its CPU temp is holding at 32 C.
- NortySpock 7y ago
  Raspberry Pi 2 wasn't a beast, but mine runs cool enough in a 22'C room to max out at 62'C when I run an ffmpeg transcode. Someone else graphed out the 2,3 and 4 temps under idle and load at 22'C: https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/dspb5g/temperature_profiles_of_bare_raspberry_pi_boards/.compact https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/dspb5g/temper...
- boomlinde 7y ago
  My Pi 2 stays comfortably cool, but it's rarely under heavy load. It serves as a Gopher file server for a bunch of old computers and occasionally a music player, so I think the heaviest thing it does at any time is to decode mp3/ogg.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
  Even Pi 4 B doesn't seem to require active cooling. It will do fine-ish (sitting at barely under the temperature cutoff limit of the thermal throttling, under load, by using a bigger type of passive heatsink), which is still quite a feat. To have a cheap totally silent computer with the specs that 4 B provides is still a great achievement.
emmelaich 7y ago
geeky nitpick -- do not use `while [ true ]; do ..` It's not doing what you think; `true` here is just a non-zero length string. `while [ false ]; do ..` does the exact same thing! Use `while true; do ...`. Or better `while :; do ...` Even better, depending on the context, is while sudo sudo /opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp; do sleep 2 done PS. why two sudos?
ImprovedSilence 7y ago
I have the fan shin on mine, set it up so it clicks over a certain temp, and it’s been working great for me.
bproven 7y ago
I have one of these cases[1] for my Pi4 4GB from Amazon. Comes with heatsink and small fan (very quiet). Right now running "watch -n 1 vcgencmd measure_temp" puts it at 36C idle. Well I guess it is actually running k3s with no deployments/pods, so fairly idle. I do remember it running a bit hotter before I updated to the latest firmware via "sudo apt full-upgrade" a few days ago. Running "stress -c 4" gets it up to about 50C ... [1] https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-iUniker-Heatsink-Model-Single/dp/B01LXSMY1N?ref_=ast_bbp_dp https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-iUniker-Heatsink-Model-Sing...
ChuckMcM 7y ago
I've got three 4GB pi4's running. Two are in FLIRC cases which do an Okay job (and they look good :-) They transfer heat to the case and the Pi peaks out on my loads at about 55C. I've also got a cheap fan+heatsink solution (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07TZQHXZ6/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07TZQHXZ6/) which does a better job and keeps the Pi under 50C on all loads (it doesn't throttle at all).
hinkley 7y ago
There’s something to be said for having the cpu on the back side of the board, like some of the NanoPi models. Easier to spread the heat with no connectors in the way.
fivesixzero 7y ago
I recently put my Telegraf configs/scripts for monitoring RPi thermals and throttling into a git repo. These might be helpful for anyone doing their own comparative testing of cooling soliutions and/or power sources. https://github.com/fivesixzero/telegraf-pi-bash https://github.com/fivesixzero/telegraf-pi-bash
Adiqq 7y ago
I'm not sure why, but my RPI4 become broken 4 times in a row. I returned it 3 times, but finally I gave up. Every time it eventually stopped to boot up and there was solid green and red LED light. There was original raspberry PI case, modified to mount Noctua 5V fan, with additional holes to allow air circulation. There was original power supply. It was only connected with ethernet, this fan through GPIO and HDD drive through USB. Now I have HP T620, can be bought cheaply, it's definitely bigger than RPI4, but finally it just works.
lightedman 7y ago
Why do companies insist on shipping something that otensibly requires a heat sink, without the heat sink itself? If I shipped out a fully-powered MK-R LED without a heat sink, saying "Oh it'll work fine!" I'd be getting chewed out within two minutes of the customer turning it on.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
  Maybe for the same reason that you can by a CPU without a heatsink - in order to provide flexibility. They assume that the number of people that will want to specialize and customize their heatsinks/fans will be so high in proportion to the people that will be just fine using the standard sink, that it is not worth it. There are very cheap easy to mount (like 2 seconds easy) heatsinks that will do the job (probably with thermal throttling though).
cocoa19 7y ago
I wish all fans use the pi temperature sensor to regulate speed. I got one with the CanaKit and it doesn't. My OCD kicks in when I can hear the fan running all day long.
rafaelm 7y ago
This video is pretty good, the guy does some testing of different cooling options: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkLr08K0c1E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkLr08K0c1E TL;DW: The Flirc case is one of the best options.
robbles 7y ago
Does running an idle k3s cluster really require adding a heatsink to the rpi? I would have thought this would generate very little load, and a major temp increase might indicate a bug in k3s? Is there a bunch of cpu-intensive work an idle cluster needs to do?
freeflight 7y ago
I wonder why PC cooling brands haven't discovered this market yet. Building a heat sink case with attachable fans doesn't seem all that impossible.
ksaj 7y ago
I read about the heat issues, so when I bought my pi4 I also got an aluminum fin cooler case with 2 fans built into it. Thankfully the fans are totally silent. I half expected it to sound like half a drone. Now I can crank it up and rip the knob off, and the temperature doesn't get anywhere near throttle point.
StillBored 7y ago
Outside of maybe the ICE cooling tower I suspect that all of these heatsink/fan solutions are woefully under specified if you happen to load the system or overclock. I grabbed one of my little 20mmx20mm heatsinks which are generally good enough for devices of that size that come passively cooled. In the RPi's case that thing got hot enough to burn me even with a small fan. So I repeated this process a few times with stuff from my junk box trying to find a passive solution eventually I ended up with a 40x40x30mm heatsink (looks sorta like this https://www.amazon.com/Karcy-Aluminum-Heatsink-Cooling-Raspberry/dp/B07QQSQDXF/ref=sr_1_42?keywords=40x40mm+heatsink&qid=1573861603&sr=8-42 https://www.amazon.com/Karcy-Aluminum-Heatsink-Cooling-Raspb... only that one says its 11mm) and a small fan. The thing is huge, but the temps stay under control and it over-clocks @2Ghz now, but I wouldn't run it like that for long even with that heatsink. I've got mine pinned at 1.75).

272 points by alexellisuk 7y ago

tmikaeld 7y ago

A model, temperature, noise, price - summary table would have been nice.

kingosticks 7y ago
And size, that ice tower thing is huge. I'd prefer the heat sink case, which I've anecdotally heard does a great job.

tpmx 7y ago

I guess Raspberry Pi 3 B+ (or CM3+) was close to the sweetspot in terms of thermal management vs performance tradeoffs, for many applications. Unless you really need more RAM or higher USB speed. I hope the next two main steps for the next Raspberry Pi (4+ or 5?) and the corresponding compute module will be: a) including a SATA controller (SD cards are not... ideal.) b) a more power-efficent node

imglorp 7y ago
Also, if your job allows, you can grab a stack and spread the load out among them. I call such a Pi stack a "bakery".
- tpmx 7y ago
  Ok.
timw4mail 7y ago
Really the 3B was probably the sweet spot. The 3B+ still benefits considerably from a heat sink.
- tpmx 7y ago
  The compute modules have a different behaviour: We're using the CM3+ on carrier boards. It's substantially better in terms of thermal performance than the CM3.
sorenjan 7y ago
I don't think a SATA controller makes sense for them. Keeping the price low is an important design goal, and adding more chips goes against that. An external hard drive with USB3 is probably the best option for a while.
- tpmx 7y ago
  I'd start looking at actual volume prices for controller chips first, before dismisssing this, but that's just me. I have no idea what the cost is, but I could imagine it to be like maybe 5-10 cents by now. Just a guess. It's that kind of old but still very useful tech by now.
  - tpmx 7y ago
    Btw: Since we needed to interface to SATA reliably via USB (from a raspi CM.) We ended up identifying a particular Taiwan-designed JMicron-based SATA/USB2 controller that worked really reliably with Linux, unlike, say every single PRC-designed SATA/USB2 controller chip we tested. It was a pretty painful experience going through all of that testing. We bought 120 retail packages of that JMicron-based product, directly from the Taiwanese producer, just to be sure, to guarantee our first-gen production run. I think many RasPi users want a reliably high-speed, low-cost storage device. It doesn't make much sense for all of these users to have go through this very annoying process. It should just work. Since the chip cost for this by now is likely very small in the raspi kind of volume, why not?
  - nlfwhulsdhouv 7y ago
    Nothing of that complexity is 5-10c in volume (even huge volumes). I would guess somewhere in the 1-2$ range, which _is_ a big issue for them. For reference, 5-10c won't even buy you a middle to low performance op-amp. The Pi became possible because of integration, where the SoC supported all the required interfaces internally so very few external ICs were required. That's what allows them to keep the price so low. Additional chips add significant additional cost. That's why there have always been compromises like the USB-connected ethernet. They can only do what the SoC supports natively.
adontz 7y ago
I'd rather welcome onboard bootable MMC.
- tpmx 7y ago
  That would certainly be a way for the foundation to go all Apple, with 3-4 different storage amount levels. I don't like it. Caveat: I think it makes sense that all RPI5 boards (except the lite Compute Modules) would have like 8-16GB onboard flash, via eMMC. If it makes sense, economically speaking. I think it could. The SD card aspect of the RPI sucks in so many ways.
  - izacus 7y ago
    Except that MMC versions of RPi already exist and it didn't really bring the world down. They're also significantly more reliable due to lack of horrible SD cards.
    - tpmx 7y ago
      Those MMC versions are called RPI compute modules. They didn't "bring the world down" because they required a separate board for them to be mounted on.
OJFord 7y ago
With the 4 you can use a USB3-SATA. I don't know if it can boot from a USB device though?
- Namidairo 7y ago
  I believe the plan was for it to support USB boot in the future, since they can update the bootloader. So not yet.
- dunnevens 7y ago
  You almost can. Needs an SD card with /boot but the rest of the OS can reside on the external drive.

jrockway 7y ago

I got a 5V Noctua fan and use this enclosure: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3723481 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3723481 Seems to stay very cool and is silent. Noctua makes some good fans.

StavrosK 7y ago
It needs a 5V fan, right? You power it from the GPIO pins directly?
- jrockway 7y ago
  Yeah, exactly.

FullyFunctional 7y ago

I have tried many options (including powerful fans), but the Flirc case [1] (whole-case passive heat sink) is my favority so far and cools well enough for a 1.75 GHz overclock under torture testing (2+ GHz would crash under torture). [1] https://flirc.tv/more/raspberry-pi-4-case https://flirc.tv/more/raspberry-pi-4-case (I'm not affiliated, just a content customer).

mizzack 7y ago
Been a fan of those Flirc cases for a while. They do a good job and look/feel top quality.
driverdan 7y ago
How do you use that with a GPIO cable?
- skraelingjar 7y ago
  There is a small gap between the bottom plastic and metal body you should be able to get a ribbon cable through but I haven't tried it on mine.
int_19h 7y ago
There is an even better take on the whole-case heat sink concept, although it gets pricey: https://wickedaluminum.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-standard-case-with-heat-dissipation https://wickedaluminum.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-standard-...
- FpUser 7y ago
  Beauty
- IshKebab 7y ago
  Quite ugly if you ask me!
- blacksmith_tb 7y ago
  Might as well go all the way to AstroPi[1] at that rate. Though I wonder if Flir couldn't make a copper-top version for less money than either, really... 1: https://makezine.com/2015/12/01/raspberry-pi-iss/ https://makezine.com/2015/12/01/raspberry-pi-iss/

georgeecollins 7y ago

The problem for me is I attach a card to the top of the Pi for robot circuitry. That makes putting a heat sink or fan on the board awkward. I feel like having to do this really compromises the versatility of the Pi. For now I am sticking to 3s until I hear the temp issue is solved.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
Is placing the card on top a must, or can you do side by side with a 40-pin jumper cable?
- georgeecollins 7y ago
  You can do that, but many boards are really designed to sit on top of the card. In a robot that walks you don't have that much space and you want to mount everything as firmly as possible to avoid a bad connection from repeated vibrations. It is possible but so far it hasn't seem worth the hassle.
opencl 7y ago
The Pi 3 has the same thermal throttling issue as the 4, and the 4's performance under throttled conditions is much higher. Though IMO even calling it an issue is overblown, most phones and laptops cannot maintain their peak clocks under load for extended periods of time either. Intel calls it turbo boost so it's a feature instead of a bug.
- georgeecollins 7y ago
  Really? Because I run a Pi with a servo board on top that gets quite hot (too hot to touch) and it seems like CPU is performing time sensitive calculations (walking kinematics) adequately. It could be that the calculations are simple enough that they are insensitive to the throttling down. Do you have a suggestion how I could write some Python code to check if the 3 is throttling down? (Maybe a link to an example?) Maybe it wouldn't be an issue on the Pi 4 that I think it is. In that case I have been holding back on switching to a 4 for no good reason. This is very helpful, thank you.

m4r35n357 7y ago

+1 for the heatsink case! [yes I have one]

aelo 7y ago
I also bought this one because I wanted a passive solution. Temperature looks fine (45°C in Idle). Although I think there are different versions and some of them don't fit perfectly on the RPi4. I got mine from amazon and it cools the three most important chips but the position where it touches the chips isn't perfect.
chewyland 7y ago
Same. Passive cooling works great and the heatsink is also a case. Dead quiet and no throttling. I'm using as a media center with my cheap 75 inch TV.

gatherhunterer 7y ago

I just put my stack of Pis in front of a Noctua NF-S12A and it cools them all very effectively, even under heavy load, without the need for any goofy hardware that blocks additions like the GPIO extender or any other HATs I may want to add. I bought an adapter to power it from one of the Pis. It’s an easy solution that works for many of them with negligible effort.

MaXtreeM 7y ago

The article is basically just a list of some options. Even for the most advanced option the author writes just about temperautures in "mostly idle" setup. Anyone has a link to an article with actual measurements?

TheGallopedHigh 7y ago
Yeah I was rather disappointed as well. Could have run the same benchmark over some length of time recording the temp at intervals to see which is the best cooling option.
h2odragon 7y ago
this is good: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-4-might-not-need-fan-anymore https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-4-might-...
gbraad 7y ago
lacking test under load make this not a very good article.
ageofwant 7y ago
Here's a nice summary video as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa3YnWhzPsw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa3YnWhzPsw
- read_if_gay_ 7y ago
  Another: https://youtu.be/AVfvhEJ9XD0 https://youtu.be/AVfvhEJ9XD0

schappim 7y ago

Disclaimer: I work for a company that owns a Raspberry Pi Approved Reseller. We spend a ridiculous amount of money testing various cases from China. In testing we found that the heat sink style[1] cases with fan work best. Having said that, for most use cases you just need to move the hot layer of air away from the SoC, so even a low speed fan will do the trick. [1] https://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/collections/cases-enclosures/products/armour-case-with-dual-cooling-fan-for-raspberry-pi https://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/collections/cases-enclo...

GhettoMaestro 7y ago
Thanks for posting this. I am deploying a few Pis in a hot environment and am now looking into the cooling issue.
phkahler 7y ago
Is it possible that a taller case with vents at bottom and top, plus a decent heat sink might provide enough convection to go fanless?
- schappim 7y ago
  Certainly, the key is hot air needs to be able to get away from the SoC. For my home lab, I don't bother with the fans/cases and instead just stack the Pis with brass spacers. I haven't had any issues yet with the ambient room temperature around 20-22ºC (68-71.6ºF for the stonecutters who keep the metric system down[1]). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZI_aEalijE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZI_aEalijE
  - colechristensen 7y ago
    Have you checked if the CPUs are throttling at load?
    - bitwize 7y ago
      I use a Pimoroni case with an open bit where the CPU and various other chips are. I also have a small heatsink on the CPU. The machine doesn't throttle under load even when I hammer it with a compilation job on all four cores.

luc_ 7y ago

Yes, I know what a heatsink is and how to google for heatsinks for a RPi. TYVM.

jascii 7y ago

"The heat will be spread out, but not moved away from the device, so once it's hot, it will likely radiate that heat around the board." The author doesn't seem to grasp the concept of convective cooling or how heatsinks are supposed to work.

GhostVII 7y ago
I think that comment was in contrast to what they said about the fan: > This option does apply a decent amount of cooling at idle and under load, it also moves the heat away from the board unlike the heatsink. I think the comment makes sense with that context, compared to a fan, the heat from a heatsink will stay near the board and make future cooling less efficient.
- OJFord 7y ago
  But with or without a fan, the point of a heatsink is to increase surface area for convection. A fan also aids convection, but instead by maintaining a larger temperature difference between the surface (however large) and the surrounding air. Either alone is good; both together are better.

lordnacho 7y ago

Here's a fun thing I just did with my RPI4. I've got "watch -n 1 vcgencmd measure_temp" running. Equilibrium temp is arount 73C running a realtime website. Take a £2 coin and place it on the CPU. Temp drops 10C within seconds. I can get it under 60C by swapping a second coin. They stay pretty hot after you take them off. Also the equilibrium temp when you just leave the coin there seems to be a good few degrees less than with no coin. Possible the larger surface area helps remove the heat, just not as good as an actually designed heatsink.

esotericn 7y ago
Yep. I bought my rpi4 in store and picked up a few tiny heatsinks from an electronics store for about 70p. I just rested them on top of the chip, no compound, no glue. Definitely reduced throttling before I could get a proper heatsink shipped. A few quids increases the surface area quite a lot!
bArray 7y ago
I think that's called "throwing money at the problem"! Taping the coin (or heat sink) down should give you better heat transfer, therefore better cooling. Designing your own case in OpenSCAD and 3D printing is a piece of cake, building a large fan into the case (lower noise) is a nice weekend project.
- Mtinie 7y ago
  This sounds like a job for the trusty denizen of the homebuilt computer builder’s toolbox, thermal paste!
- jagged-chisel 7y ago
  A bit of thermal paste between the chip and the coin would also help with heat transfer
  - lostlogin 7y ago
    Paste between coins with a stacking arrangement going big-small-big-small etc so that there was a semblance of fins would be interesting.

esotericn 7y ago

I have the ICE tower with mad LEDs! 'cos I'm a little boy inside. Stable 33% overclock, I'm typing to you from it now. :D $ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_max_freq 2000000 pic: https://files.esotericnonsense.com/pub/rpi-tower.jpg https://files.esotericnonsense.com/pub/rpi-tower.jpg

glouwbug 7y ago
Do you use it as your desktop machine? This is fascinating
- esotericn 7y ago
  Yes. I run Arch on it. Firefox, youtube, etc are full speed and very usable. I do have an x86 laptop which I use on the go, and a server that I SSH in to for heavy loading like compilation etc.
  - dunnevens 7y ago
    Does Arch fix screen tearing? The Pi4 Raspian desktop has a strong problem with that.
    - opan 7y ago
      Running Wayland would probably do the trick.
barsonme 7y ago
Same with the ICE tower and 2GHz overclock. Even with stress tests I can't get the Pi to break 50 C. I don't use mine as a desktop yet, though. I just run 8 Docker containers for stuff like DNS, Time Machine backup, etc. The goofy-looking Pi: https://www.ericlagergren.com/share/d9htGfiETJHN3ua https://www.ericlagergren.com/share/d9htGfiETJHN3ua
- esotericn 7y ago

205guy 7y ago

I'm no expert, but one of the blogs I read had detailed posts about putting a heatsink and fan on a RPi3B+ and using it as a desktop and dev machine: https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2018/09/raspberry-pi-3b-flirc-case-thermals-and.html https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2018/09/raspberry-pi-3b-flirc-ca... https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2018/09/project-pi3bdesk-making-even-better.html https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2018/09/project-pi3bdesk-making-...

yellowapple 7y ago

Has anyone tried immersion cooling (i.e. submerging an RPi in mineral oil)? Tempted to try it myself; just need some spare time (that I don't squander by commenting on Hacker News ;) ).

Sendotsh 7y ago
Yes it has been done, and works[0-3], it's just a matter of effort vs reward. Generally a simple heat sink and/or small fan setup works fine for nearly any usecase the Pi is designed for, and if you really do need to do heavier loads that require that level of effort to cool, then you probably shouldn't be using a Pi in the first place. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJRrGCqG9Jc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJRrGCqG9Jc [1] https://hackaday.com/2018/08/13/oil-immersed-raspberry-pi-keeps-its-cool-under-heavy-loads/ https://hackaday.com/2018/08/13/oil-immersed-raspberry-pi-ke... [2] https://hackaday.com/2017/05/15/liquid-cooling-overclocked-raspberry-pi-with-style/ https://hackaday.com/2017/05/15/liquid-cooling-overclocked-r... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/bmeklj/pi_immersion_cooling/ https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/bmeklj/pi_imm... If it's just for fun, then I think water-cooling Pi's looks way more interesting to play with: http://finniss.net/water-cooled-raspberry-pi/ http://finniss.net/water-cooled-raspberry-pi/ https://modmymods.com/modmymods-raspberry-pi-mini-water-cooling-kit-mod-0171.html https://modmymods.com/modmymods-raspberry-pi-mini-water-cool...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mrlambchop 7y ago

Having recently built a picade with a Pi4 and ran it in a cool room for around 2 hours, the device kept crashing when playing various emulators. After the final crash, it didn't start up again. Opening up the back was like opening the door to an oven and the Pi4 was just steaming. Nothing was obviously melted, but it didn't work again :(

darkmighty 7y ago
This seems conflicting with what I read about its behavior. It should heavily throttle (underclock) itself, but shouldn't destroy itself. Maybe you got a defective unit or the hot thermal environments caused issues elsewhere (again maybe due to some defect).
- mrlambchop 7y ago
  Oh, I'm sending it back to be looked at. The hat that comes with the picade doesn't have space for a heatsink or fan under it (as the instructions are put together to assemble it) so I'm also suspecting that its early doors for the Pi4 and picade still.
- colechristensen 7y ago
  I had a power supply with similar problems which actually started on fire - I had been restarting it repeatedly after it kept (supposably) hitting thermal or some other shutdown condition. Lesson: just because there are protections for going past limits doesn't mean that everything is fine when you are constantly hitting them. (applicable to our current government problems sadly)
- dannyw 7y ago
  There's only so much throttling it can do. If there really was zero ventilation and ambient temps were hot, components can start melting.
- duxup 7y ago
  Throttle but.... will it shutdown intentionally due to temperature?

derekp7 7y ago

One of my disappointments with the Pi 4 is that the official case for it got rid of any ventilation. Previous cases had vents and a removable top plate. I've found that the Primori fan shim works really good, but only with the cover removed. Will have to try drilling some vent holes in the cover and the back side of the case, and see if I can make it look good.

bakul 7y ago

Note that the main issue here is to avoid cpu throttling due to excessive heat. IIRC you can allow a higher cut-off temp (100ºC instead 77ºC) by setting a config parameter. This will possibly reduce the chip lifespan from whatever it is to decades! But make sure no one can accidentally touch the chip. I have one case with a fan and one case where part of the case body attaches to the chip top with thermal goop. The fan works better.

AceJohnny2 7y ago

So many ad-hoc solutions, but I can't seem to find the maximum power consumption/TDP of the RasPi4, which would inform the kind of dissipation you'd need. Best I could find was the BCM2711 (the Broadcom SoC at the heart of the RasPi4) "datasheet" (a frickin' Word document) [1] that says the board requires a PSU capable of providing 3A at 5V. So that'd be 15W. [1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bcm2711/rpi_DATA_2711_1p0_preliminary.pdf https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

fivesixzero 7y ago
RPi power consumption and power supply is a bit more complicated than it seems on the surface. A large problem is that even “3A rated" supplies suffer large voltage droop under load. This can be seen pretty easily using a cheap USB DC load [0]. As load goes up, voltage tends to drop slowly at first, then heavily at a certain point. Several I’ve bought drop as low as 4.1V at just 2A load which will almost definitely make any Pi very unhappy. I haven’t found an authoritative source but generally the Pi’s power management system starts complaining (flipping the “undervolt since boot” bitflag [1] in “vcgencmd get_throttled”) around 4.6-4.7V [2] To monitor the throttled bitflags, which also report thermal throttling, I wrote a basic shell script that just converts the hex to bin then returns a Grok-ready string with the flags as booleans. I've already got Telegraf on the RPis sending basic host metrics to an InfluxDB instance so that script just gets called by an exec input to generate and persist the data for monitoring or analysis. Eventually I'd love to write (or contribute to) a proper Golang Telegraf plug-in that just reads from the VC mailbox directly but that's still on the back burner. As far as actual power consumption during use, I’ve recently started running tests using a decent USB power meter (WITRN/Qway U2 [3] and X models, in particular) to monitor load over time while running various workloads on a Pi Zero W, a Pi 3B+ and a 4GB Pi 4. Power usage at idle is usually low but even that's unpredictable. Daemons are gonna daemon regardless of the user load. Generally though the load goes up substantially when powering peripherals - Ethernet, USB, BCM VideoCore enc/dec/CSI/SSI, SD card R/W, HDMI, fans, HATs, GPIO peripherals, etc. CPU load definitely factors in heavily, of course, but it’s only part of the picture. For reducing power usage, some surprisingly simple things can help. As a very minor example, shutting off the activity LED [4] can save a few dozen mA. :) [0] https://www.droking.com/Intelligent-USB-Adjustable-Constant-Current-Electronic-Load-DC3-21V-3.5A-35W-Mobile-Power-Detector-Tester-USB-Discharge-Resistance https://www.droking.com/Intelligent-USB-Adjustable-Constant-... [1] https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/48329/undervoltage-warning-despite-decent-power-supply/48337#48337 https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/48329/underv... [2] https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=147781&start=50#p972790 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=1477... [3] https://usbchargingblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/11/web-u2-usb-meter-monitor-upm-quick-look/ https://usbchargingblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/11/web-u2-usb-... [4] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/controlling-pwr-act-leds-raspberry-pi https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/controlling...

echelon 7y ago

What was the last version of Raspberry Pi that didn't require cooling? What's the best-spec'd Pi (or comparable alternative) that doesn't require fans?

darkmighty 7y ago
Most don't require cooling, but will have better clocks. The 4 itself throttles under heat (above 60C and heavily over 80C), and seems to have good enough behavior even if not actively cooled.
watchdogtimer 7y ago
Probably either the Odroid N2 or HC2 or Nano Pi M4. The one feature all these boards have in common is their CPU is mounted on the _bottom_ of the board, allowing a much larger heat sink to be mounted without obstructing anything. The lack of this feature in on the RPi 4 is a fatal blunder IMHO and why I chose not to buy it. I currently use a Nano Pi M4 as my main desktop computer. It has no active cooling, only a big heatsink which covers the entire rear of the board. As I write this, I have three browser windows open containing a total of 30 tabs while streaming a 44 kHz stereo 128 kbps audio stream. Its CPU temp is holding at 32 C.
NortySpock 7y ago
Raspberry Pi 2 wasn't a beast, but mine runs cool enough in a 22'C room to max out at 62'C when I run an ffmpeg transcode. Someone else graphed out the 2,3 and 4 temps under idle and load at 22'C: https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/dspb5g/temperature_profiles_of_bare_raspberry_pi_boards/.compact https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/dspb5g/temper...
boomlinde 7y ago
My Pi 2 stays comfortably cool, but it's rarely under heavy load. It serves as a Gopher file server for a bunch of old computers and occasionally a music player, so I think the heaviest thing it does at any time is to decode mp3/ogg.
Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
Even Pi 4 B doesn't seem to require active cooling. It will do fine-ish (sitting at barely under the temperature cutoff limit of the thermal throttling, under load, by using a bigger type of passive heatsink), which is still quite a feat. To have a cheap totally silent computer with the specs that 4 B provides is still a great achievement.

emmelaich 7y ago

geeky nitpick -- do not use `while [ true ]; do ..` It's not doing what you think; `true` here is just a non-zero length string. `while [ false ]; do ..` does the exact same thing! Use `while true; do ...`. Or better `while :; do ...` Even better, depending on the context, is while sudo sudo /opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp; do sleep 2 done PS. why two sudos?

ImprovedSilence 7y ago

I have the fan shin on mine, set it up so it clicks over a certain temp, and it’s been working great for me.

bproven 7y ago

I have one of these cases[1] for my Pi4 4GB from Amazon. Comes with heatsink and small fan (very quiet). Right now running "watch -n 1 vcgencmd measure_temp" puts it at 36C idle. Well I guess it is actually running k3s with no deployments/pods, so fairly idle. I do remember it running a bit hotter before I updated to the latest firmware via "sudo apt full-upgrade" a few days ago. Running "stress -c 4" gets it up to about 50C ... [1] https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-iUniker-Heatsink-Model-Single/dp/B01LXSMY1N?ref_=ast_bbp_dp https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-iUniker-Heatsink-Model-Sing...

ChuckMcM 7y ago

I've got three 4GB pi4's running. Two are in FLIRC cases which do an Okay job (and they look good :-) They transfer heat to the case and the Pi peaks out on my loads at about 55C. I've also got a cheap fan+heatsink solution (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07TZQHXZ6/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07TZQHXZ6/) which does a better job and keeps the Pi under 50C on all loads (it doesn't throttle at all).

hinkley 7y ago

There’s something to be said for having the cpu on the back side of the board, like some of the NanoPi models. Easier to spread the heat with no connectors in the way.

fivesixzero 7y ago

I recently put my Telegraf configs/scripts for monitoring RPi thermals and throttling into a git repo. These might be helpful for anyone doing their own comparative testing of cooling soliutions and/or power sources. https://github.com/fivesixzero/telegraf-pi-bash https://github.com/fivesixzero/telegraf-pi-bash

Adiqq 7y ago

I'm not sure why, but my RPI4 become broken 4 times in a row. I returned it 3 times, but finally I gave up. Every time it eventually stopped to boot up and there was solid green and red LED light. There was original raspberry PI case, modified to mount Noctua 5V fan, with additional holes to allow air circulation. There was original power supply. It was only connected with ethernet, this fan through GPIO and HDD drive through USB. Now I have HP T620, can be bought cheaply, it's definitely bigger than RPI4, but finally it just works.

lightedman 7y ago

Why do companies insist on shipping something that otensibly requires a heat sink, without the heat sink itself? If I shipped out a fully-powered MK-R LED without a heat sink, saying "Oh it'll work fine!" I'd be getting chewed out within two minutes of the customer turning it on.

Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
Maybe for the same reason that you can by a CPU without a heatsink - in order to provide flexibility. They assume that the number of people that will want to specialize and customize their heatsinks/fans will be so high in proportion to the people that will be just fine using the standard sink, that it is not worth it. There are very cheap easy to mount (like 2 seconds easy) heatsinks that will do the job (probably with thermal throttling though).

cocoa19 7y ago

I wish all fans use the pi temperature sensor to regulate speed. I got one with the CanaKit and it doesn't. My OCD kicks in when I can hear the fan running all day long.

rafaelm 7y ago

This video is pretty good, the guy does some testing of different cooling options: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkLr08K0c1E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkLr08K0c1E TL;DW: The Flirc case is one of the best options.

robbles 7y ago

Does running an idle k3s cluster really require adding a heatsink to the rpi? I would have thought this would generate very little load, and a major temp increase might indicate a bug in k3s? Is there a bunch of cpu-intensive work an idle cluster needs to do?

freeflight 7y ago

I wonder why PC cooling brands haven't discovered this market yet. Building a heat sink case with attachable fans doesn't seem all that impossible.

ksaj 7y ago

I read about the heat issues, so when I bought my pi4 I also got an aluminum fin cooler case with 2 fans built into it. Thankfully the fans are totally silent. I half expected it to sound like half a drone. Now I can crank it up and rip the knob off, and the temperature doesn't get anywhere near throttle point.

StillBored 7y ago

Outside of maybe the ICE cooling tower I suspect that all of these heatsink/fan solutions are woefully under specified if you happen to load the system or overclock. I grabbed one of my little 20mmx20mm heatsinks which are generally good enough for devices of that size that come passively cooled. In the RPi's case that thing got hot enough to burn me even with a small fan. So I repeated this process a few times with stuff from my junk box trying to find a passive solution eventually I ended up with a 40x40x30mm heatsink (looks sorta like this https://www.amazon.com/Karcy-Aluminum-Heatsink-Cooling-Raspberry/dp/B07QQSQDXF/ref=sr_1_42?keywords=40x40mm+heatsink&qid=1573861603&sr=8-42 https://www.amazon.com/Karcy-Aluminum-Heatsink-Cooling-Raspb... only that one says its 11mm) and a small fan. The thing is huge, but the temps stay under control and it over-clocks @2Ghz now, but I wouldn't run it like that for long even with that heatsink. I've got mine pinned at 1.75).