15 ms·
Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)
- roland35 6y agoThis is timely for me, I finally am upgrading my original A to a 4! Another advantage of the Flirc case is that it hides the blinking lights which are so tempting for my toddler!
- herogreen 6y agoNice test, it could be cool to have people repeating it to see how much the "silicon lotery" influences the temps. Also there a few model of cases on ebay/aliexpress that would be interesting to test such as https://m.aliexpress.com/item/4000509636456.html https://m.aliexpress.com/item/4000509636456.html (with a heatsink added)
- philliphaydon 6y agoI have one of these: https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/1200x900/4340-08.jpg https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/1200x900/4340-08.jpg It never gets hot that I can't touch it. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000392602236.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000392602236.html
- no_gravity 6y agoMy PI is too cool. It freezes. I have playing with a PI Zero W over the last weeks. At first everything worked as expected. But now it developed some strange "hangings" I cannot explain. It kinda randomly freezes in time for a few minutes every now and then. Sometimes it takes several minutes to ssh into it. Sometimes, the terminal just freezes for several minutes. Neither top nor iostat seem to show any elevated activity during these periods. Since they hang throughout the freeze, its a bit hard to say though. The strangest thing: Pings to the PI always come back fast. So its probably not that the hardware really freezes completely.
- jstanley 6y agoI've had this sort of issue caused by bad SD cards. Basically anything that touches the disk can block for several seconds sometimes.
- numpad0 6y agodisk issues?
- mszcz 6y agoHave you tried replacing the SD card with a fresh one with a fresh install and checking if this still occurs? I've had a somewhat similar problem and it turned out to be a dying SD card.
- no_gravity 6y agoI will try that. At first I would like to see if I can find the problem. I would have thought that when the SD card is not responding, it would show up as "wa" in top and "%util" in iostat -x. But both are zero for the next output after a freeze.
- xrmagnum 6y agoIs your hostname added to /etc/hosts?
- dsun179 6y agoI had a similar problem. For me the reason was that I used a cheap charger with too less power.
- no_gravity 6y agoJust exchanged the charger .. the hanging still occurs.
- tleb_ 6y agoCould strace on the ssh server help you? You would know if it's a disk issue.
- reitanqild 6y agoAnyone has links to similar articles with regards to either - SD card reliability - techniques for reliably using what we have ? Given that people are using these for all kinds of stuff there must be some advanced techniques being used (or some basic I have missed).
- roland35 6y agoMy original pi has been corrupting SD cards all the time, especially now that I am running pi hole on it which seems to need more RAM than is available on my old board.
- lis 6y agoI've been running a raspberry 3 with a cheap sandisk sd card for years now without any SD Card issues. It runs a DNS based ad-blocker and a vpn. I am logging everything to ram instead of writing it to the card and that's about it. I never encountered any issue with SD Card reliability, despite me sometimes just pulling the plug instead of properly shutting it down. Here is a simple guide: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/62536 https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/62536 I do have a couple of other raspberries for other uses (e.g. a small rc car) which are also running on their first SD card. Might be just luck, but I do think that it's not necessary to go to extreme lengths to have them run reliably.
- lloeki 6y agoMany problems with SD cards are actually rooted in power issues (bad power source or usb device that eats power). Ever since I took proper measures to ensure stable enough power I've had no issue (Pi 3B here)
- robotmay 6y agoI can second this. My previous company runs a few hundred Pi units across loads of separate locations; the locations where we had constant corruption issues were also the ones experiencing dodgy site power-supply issues. We did try various alternatives to cheap SD cards but ultimately running them off PoE from a switch attached to a UPS was a pretty good solution to the issue.
- mseidl 6y agoI've had a little fan on an old rpi3 I had and it was annoyingly loud.
- m463 6y agoThe reasonable answer seems to be the flirc case. No noise, no moving parts, excellent cooling.
- ohazi 6y agoThe flirc case is a giant heat capacitor, not a heat sink. Notice that it has the only temperature curve where the temperature does not go back to baseline after the stress test. It needs a lot longer to get to equilibrium, and the final temperature is almost certainly hotter than what's shown on the graph.
- dannyw 6y agoexactly. For passive heat sinks, you need big surface areas. The FLIR case doesn’t do that and is arguably one of the worst options esp considering its price.
- zeckalpha 6y ago$16?
- rcarmo 6y agoI have been running one for a few months, and it does get consistently warm, but does not throttle the CPU (at least for my workloads). Will be setting up a second one as a “workstation” soon.
- GloriousKoji 6y agoThere's still a good increase in surface area for convection it's definitely a heatsink. The graph does a poor job showing this but the start and stop idle time is 5 minutes. That's a good amount of time for temperature to settle.
- elcomet 6y agoYou can additionally stick a cpu heatsink on it (like prop. 2 in this article). This will help dissipate heat from the case. But overall, this case is still better than bare pi, or regular plastic case (the heat capacitor has much larger surface than the cpu of the pi).
- smichel17 6y agoI own one. To some extent you're right. My pi runs mpd and pi-hole at all times and under that relatively low load, the case is constantly warm to the touch. But it has enough surface area that I've never been worried about overheating. Refer to TFA -- a tiny little heat sink on the cpu was all that was need to keep from throttling. I don't have the hardware to give a proper surface temp reading. I can measure the pi's reported temperature / test for throttling under extended load later, but for now: I stuck an "instant"-read thermometer intended for cooking into one of the usb ports, which was the hottest place I could find on the case. It measures 36.1°, compared to an ambient temp of 23.4°.
- dannyw 6y agoWhy do people use cases on a Pi? I’ve never ever used a case. My Pis are always out of the way and in a shelf somewhere, untouched until I make modifications to the setup, in which case the case is often coming off anyway.
- ohazi 6y agoThere are "hardware project RPis" where you're always futzing with the gpio header, and then there are "appliance RPis" that live on top of the router they're connected to via a six inch Ethernet patch cable. A case is common for the appliances.
- Arnt 6y agoSo the cleaners will touch the case, not the electronics. Also, the bare board doesn't offer a convenient way to fix the Pi to a wall IIRC.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago> Also, the bare board doesn't offer a convenient way to fix the Pi to a wall IIRC. My Pi 3 has little circular holes that I assume are meant to mount into a case, but which I have successfully used to just hang the board on a hook on the wall.
- rcarmo 6y agoDust and protection from casual accidents. Having a naked board on any kind of desk is just asking for trouble...
- the_af 6y agoI'm gonna go ahead and be the shallow person here: I kinda like the look of the cases. It's a shame the official case has the worst heat problem, because it looks the coolest to me.
- rc4hobby 6y agoThermal engineer here. There absolutely no need to use fan cooling, humongous heatsinks or harebrained temperature controller schemes to cool the raspberry pi 4. All that is needed is a small heatsink to slightly decrease the thermal resistance to ambient air, to stay below the thermal throttling threshold. Anything more complicated than that is a pointless exercise in pointlessness.
- jstanley 6y agoThis is basically an appeal to authority. You haven't explained what property of the Raspberry Pi 4 means that a tiny heatsink is sufficient. Why can't I just replace the words "raspberry pi 4" with anything else and conclude that I never need fans or large heatsinks?
- Spivak 6y agoBecause you can see in the graphs that the bare pi doesn’t get that hot. If you allow just a bit more heat to escape you push the graph down to where the peak sits just below the throttling point. For home/hobby use this doesn’t matter too much but you typically want to run as hot as allowable. It’s a win-win since small heat sinks are cheap and don’t have any moving parts.
- StillBored 6y agoRunning 32-bit raspbian... Try that with a 64-bit OS, running 64-bit compiles/etc. I have a huge heatsink on mine (40mm cube), and even without the overclock it will crank up to 80C doing long running compiles. Running it at 80C for an hour or two, the temp of everything on the board starts to approach 80C. Touching the usb ports at that point will give you a surprise. So, I added a small 20mm fan, and set the profile to kick on at 60C, which generally keeps the soc thermals in the 60-70C range. No throttling, and still no noise because with that large of a heatsink it doesn't take much air to cool it. Add in a couple hundred Mhz of overclocking and that fan stays on pretty much all the time.
- throwaway-9320 6y ago
- tosh 6y agovertical orientation also seems to impact temperature """ Simply moving Raspberry Pi 4 into a vertical orientation has an immediate impact: the SoC idles around 2°C lower than the previous best and heats a lot more slowly – allowing it to run the synthetic workload for longer without throttling and maintain a dramatically improved average clock speed. There are several factors at work: having the components oriented vertically improves convection, allowing the surrounding air to draw the heat away more quickly, while lifting the rear of the board from a heat-insulating desk surface dramatically increases the available surface area for cooling. """ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/thermal-testing-raspberry-pi-4/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/thermal-testing-raspberry-p...
- jacquesm 6y agoIt's not that simple in the general case though: putting a board vertical will cause the top of the board to be hotter than the bottom, possibly a lot hotter than it would have been in a horizontal position even if the average temperature of the board is a lower one! Looking through a thermal imaging camera gives all kinds of interesting insights.
- sixothree 6y agoThis is a useful article. Thank you.
- vardump 6y agoThe article is dated November 22, 2019, which makes me wonder whether it was before the Raspberry Pi 4 firmware upgrade that reduced heat generation quite a bit. My two 4GB Raspberry Pi 4s have had no thermal issues. Running the same measurement script now, will report back the results. Edit: Ok, done with the tests. Both RPi4s are bare and should be running exactly the same versions. RPi4 #1 started at 51C, peak 79C, no throttling at any point. Ambient temperature 24C. RPi4 #2 started at 54C, peak 82C at which point it started to throttle. Ambient temperature 27C.
- kingosticks 6y agoAre you talking about the update described at https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-4-might-not-need-fan-anymore https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-4-might-... which is mentioned in the article? Or something else?
- vardump 6y agoPossibly. I haven't closely followed RPi4 firmware development, but I did notice positive changes since June 2019. I think there have been at least two occasions that dropped the (idle) operating temperatures. In any case, I'm happy with their thermal performance.
- kingosticks 6y agoI've also a feeling there were two things they changed but I don't recall what the first one was. And I don't think there's been any more improvements since November so I think this article includes everything so far. When the pi 4 first came out, mine throttled when driving two screens and that was depressing. I've not tried that setup again since but I really should.
- hajile 6y agoTDP theoretically scales linearly with clockspeed and scales worse in reality. Most Pi 4 can sustain 2.1GHz CPU and 650-750MHz GPU. That's a 30-35% increase in clockspeeds. If I'm taxing the system, even a FLIRC case will throttle on my pi. ICE tower has done an amazing job and the sound isn't noticeable on 3.3 volts. In fact, you can simply unplug the fan and passively cool (though it'll throttle after a few minutes at peak clocks). I used the pi for dev work for a few weeks as an experiment. Overclocking is the single-biggest improvement you can make. An overclock combined with the IPC improvements from a 64-bit OS, and load improvements via SSD, the system is probably 75% faster which is a huge deal at that performance level (the difference between extremely frustrating and just mildly annoying at times).
- louwrentius 6y agoI’ve tested a heatsink case on a Pi4 with and without fans. Without the fans at max load (all cores) it didn’t pass 60 degrees Celsius (20C ambient). So fans are not required.
- teddyc 6y agoSame, I hit 59 degC max running the script from tfa. I'm in a house with the A/C on set to 80 degF. Edit: this is my case https://chicagodist.com/products/black-raspberrypi-4-armor-aluminum-alloy-cooling-case https://chicagodist.com/products/black-raspberrypi-4-armor-a...
- umaar 6y agoI've been doing voice + screencasting on a modern MacBook Pro. The fans seem to intermittently kick at full blast while connected to a 4k external display, or sometimes it's just Dropbox doing CPU intensive things. Either way it's disruptive to the sound, and background noise removal in post doesn't completely fix it. I've never had to think about heat dissipation so much. Might try a laptop cooling pad.
- tjpnz 6y agoI'm using mine primarily as a streaming device. In my experience a heatsink is more than good enough. Depending on your workload all a fan will do is make a bunch of noise and spread dust around.
- ChuckMcM 6y agoI have a bunch of the FLIRC cases for my various versions. They are relatively expensive for what they are but they work well.
- digitalsushi 6y agoUp here in NH it gets a little chilly in the barn loft where the server rack is hiding inside an old credenza. A chicken egg incubator on a heat switch keeps the spinny disks on the NAS above 35F and it turns off at 45F. It only turned on a few times during the coldest days last year. I dont know for a fact whether spinny disks like to be above freezing but anecdotally someone said yes and it was 12 bucks to set it up.
- walshemj 6y agoWhen we had some very cold winters in the UK I had to wait for the room to warm up for our 8 inch floppys to work in our DEC PDP.
- alexellisuk 6y agoFolks may also enjoy "Cooling off your Raspberry Pi 4" from my blog (also in 2019) https://blog.alexellis.io/cooling-off-your-rpi4/ https://blog.alexellis.io/cooling-off-your-rpi4/ I compare a number of the different fan / heatsink solutions including pro/cons along with a hacked Noctua fan