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Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

jeffgeerling.com

21–30 of 97 posts

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#21
Thermal 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.

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#22

Thermal 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.

I kind of agree. I think in most situations, a Pi is going to sit idle most of the time, so it won't need active cooling.

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#23
post #18

Why 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.

So 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.

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#24

Thermal 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.

Would you describe that flirc case as complicated? To a naïve layman, it seems like the smallest all-metal case that'll fit the rpi4, made so that the metal acts as a heatsink. Which may be more heatsink area than a 15W CPU needs, but not bigger case area than is needed. Is there something I'm missing?

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#25

Thermal 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.

Can you qualify your statement (please)?

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#26
post #14

The 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.

You 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).

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#27
post #16
post #14

The 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.

exactly. 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.

$16?

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#28
post #22

Thermal 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.

I kind of agree. I think in most situations, a Pi is going to sit idle most of the time, so it won't need active cooling.

What if I want to use pi 4 as a building farm? Especially now with the 8gb version out, it seems to be suitable for building haskell programms

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#29
post #28
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of agree. I think in most situations, a Pi is going to sit idle most of the time, so it won't need active cooling.

What if I want to use pi 4 as a building farm? Especially now with the 8gb version out, it seems to be suitable for building haskell programms

Well then I'd say sure, of course you need cooling. But I'd also guess that you're within <1% of Rpi users who actually need cooling, and I'd guess that's also why Rpi doesn't come with a radiator by default - vast majority of users simply don't need one and it would increase the cost.

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#30

Anyone 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).

Regarding microSD card reliability, one option would be to simply forego the microSD card completely and boot the Raspberry Pi 4 via an SSD connected to one of the Raspberry Pi’s USB 3.0 ports.

I was originally going to recommend checking out this¹ article for instructions on how to do it. However, much of the instructions are no longer valid (as of two weeks ago!) since they assume that the Raspberry Pi 4 doesn’t natively support booting from USB, which finally isn’t the case (although only if you use the current beta bootloader²). I’d still recommend reading it though, as it also mentions known working 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.0, M.2 NVMe to USB 3.0, M.2 SATA to USB 3.0, and mSATA to USB 3.0 adapters. In addition, I’d recommend checking out this³ article with some recommended SSDs; in particular, this⁴ 120 GB Kingston A400 SATA 3 2.5” Solid State Drive coupled with this⁵ StarTech 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.0 Adapter, which also has the added bonus of giving you far better speeds than a microSD card would! As the author of that article mentions:

The Kingston A400 drive performs really well in the Raspberry Pi Storage Benchmarks⁶. It’s a great drive and is cheaper than many mid-range MicroSD cards.

The 2.5″ SATA to USB adapter above allows us to do this. There is no power adapter needed as SSDs are low power and are powered by the Pi through USB.

――――――

¹ — https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-4-usb-boot-config-gu...

² — https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/boot-raspberry-pi-4-usb

³ — https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-storage-benchmarks-2...

⁴ — https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N6JQS8C/

⁵ — https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HJZJI84/

⁶ — https://storage.jamesachambers.com/

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