You can't rule out a fan sucking in dusty air from side or worse, bottom of the case. Most N100 systems have too much air circulation inside to forget them in t

You can't rule out a fan sucking in dusty air from side or worse, bottom of the case. Most N100 systems have too much air circulation inside to forget them in the long term. Many N100 systems come with 5W TDP as default. However, this is more of an "average" TDP. It doesn't prevent the CPU to enable its turbo and exhaust its thermal budget. Forcing it to lower envelopes via cpufreqd would work, but you're limited by your fan again, which will make everything dusty, eventually. I have found a pretty cheap completely aluminum case [0] which sucks heat from every IC and bottom of the case via silicon thermal pads. It keeps the processor at 37 degrees, cools USB bridge and power controller too. With no moving part, case is almost airtight. So, it's sitting snug and cool in that case. You can't burn RPi in that configuration. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/GeeekPi-Aluminum-Raspberry-Cooling-Thermal/dp/B0CP2DSWHD?ref_=ast_sto_dp https://www.amazon.com/GeeekPi-Aluminum-Raspberry-Cooling-Th...