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The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan

jeffgeerling.com

211–220 of 293 posts

Re: The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan

#212
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is mainly down to the FAT16/ FAT32 filesystem on the SD cards. Those filesystems have never been particularly reliable, when those were the dominant hard drive formats, MANY users back then lost data (and backing up to floppy had its own set of issues). This is why you have to unmount USB drives, if you pull the drive while data is still in cache would also create problems. The difference is when copyi…

The microSD card in a Raspberry Pi uses an ext4 filesystem, not FAT.

The root partition is ext4, while the boot partition is FAT; plug it into a windows machine and it just sees the boot part, so people assume the whole thing is FAT

Re: The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Pi4 is overpowered for a Kodi box. That said, there is a huge number of applications for overpowered LED blinkers, and no lack of people to use them. And there is a great deal of educational value on having those boards available and easy to get. Besides, it's becoming hard to find people without access to a machine where they can learn basic computer science. So this one niche is closing down, while the Pi is st…

Could you elaborate on why you think Pi 4 is "overpowered" for Kodi? From what I've seen, there are still some kinks playing 4K HEVC videos. So hopefully, when software/firmware/etc. catches up, it should be "just powerful enough" for a Kodi box, all because of hardware decode. Barely handling 4K does not scream "overpowered for a media center" to me.

Ok, I didn't think about 4k videos, or software codecs.

Re: The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan

#214
post #146

This article is actually describing how the Raspberry Pi 4 does NOT need a fan. This is not the 1990s. It is perfectly acceptable and even advantageous to design for a high peak:normal load ratio, with thermal throttling. In this case, it allows for a compact, cheap, fanless design for the vast majority of users. There is no evidence the heat dissipated will impact lifespan. It is common for the components picked out…

If you advertise a product with certain specs, and the user can only use the full capability during a fraction of the time, then that is misleading.

Tell Tesla then, they cannot make a full fast lap of Nurburgring.

Actually, most cars can break so much so often before they lose performance because of overheating or even burning brakes.

Re: The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan

#217

Raspberry Pi is becoming like a NUC. Meanwhile, there are people using Intel NUCs as fanless Hackintoshes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUUP8K3RqAo

Except the Raspberry Pi is an ARM SOC (ARM64 in this case), while Intel NUCs are x86-64. macOS requires x86-64 for now. If Apple ports it to ARM, I really doubt they'll make it easy to run on other ARM hardware.

Re: The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan

#218
post #146

This article is actually describing how the Raspberry Pi 4 does NOT need a fan. This is not the 1990s. It is perfectly acceptable and even advantageous to design for a high peak:normal load ratio, with thermal throttling. In this case, it allows for a compact, cheap, fanless design for the vast majority of users. There is no evidence the heat dissipated will impact lifespan. It is common for the components picked out…

> There is no evidence the heat dissipated will impact lifespan.

I have to nitpick at this a little bit as a professional EE who works in high-reliability electronics. Wearout rates absolutely do depend on temperature (and thus heat), and thus the chips used here will have a shorter lifetime than those with active cooling. Now, whether that lifetime will be long enough for the common user is another question (maybe it's 1 million hours of life that get reduced to 100,000 hours, so not normally noticable).

Re: The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan

#219
post #146

This article is actually describing how the Raspberry Pi 4 does NOT need a fan. This is not the 1990s. It is perfectly acceptable and even advantageous to design for a high peak:normal load ratio, with thermal throttling. In this case, it allows for a compact, cheap, fanless design for the vast majority of users. There is no evidence the heat dissipated will impact lifespan. It is common for the components picked out…

I'll respectfully disagree. Running my Pi 4 with no fan/heatsink reduces performance to an absolute crawl. It's on par with the desktop on the original Pi released in 2012, i.e. nigh unusable for anything beyond saying "yep, it boots to desktop". Thermal throttling effectively neuters the device.

I have it in an open-air acrylic "sandwich" style case now, with the same Pi-Fan as the author, and it feels performant enough to use as a daily driver for web browsing and other light duties (basically on par with any Chromebook I've come across the past few years). It's still not "desktop replacement" level due to the SD card performance hit, but it's finally good enough for its intended use case in education without being frustrating. Once boot-from-USB3 arrives it will likely be fast enough to use as a second Linux workstation in a serious capacity.

Re: The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan

#220
I'd worry more about placement of the uSD card under the hottest parts of the board, where there's 0 air circulation in the original rpi case.

"The higher the temperature that the NAND flash experiences, the greater the acceleration of charge de-trapping mechanisms that could lead to random data bit failures. NAND endurance is also impacted since endurance has an inverse relationship to data retention, and the rate of wear-out of NAND cells is affected by temperature at the time of programming and erasing NAND."

https://www.eeweb.com/profile/eli-tiomkin/articles/industria...

This effect is very significant. It's like the acceleration being 250x higher between 25°C and 70°C.

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