Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

jeffgeerling.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 97 posts

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

#41

Post by tosh »

vertical 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-p...

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

#42

Post by vardump »

The 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.

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

#43

Post by bmurphy1976 »

no_gravity wrote: post #4

My 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 act…

Sounds like a crappy sdcard to me. I tossed an older one out recently that would randomly stall during io operations.

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

#44

Post by rcarmo »

dannyw wrote: 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.

Dust and protection from casual accidents. Having a naked board on any kind of desk is just asking for trouble...

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

#45

Post by no_gravity »

tleb_ wrote: post #31
no_gravity wrote: post #4

My 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 act…

Could strace on the ssh server help you? You would know if it's a disk issue.

How would that work?

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

#46

Post by _trampeltier »

reitanqild wrote: post #5

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).

For 2-3 years I had a tower (1m height) with 8 RP3s, 4 thinker boards and about 12 Orange Pis (different models). I did run different BOINC projects on it. So the load was 100% 24/7.

The whole time I had 1 or 2 broken SD cards. Temperature was never an issue.

I put on all SBCs just a passive heatsink (about 30x30x20mm). I installed packs with 4 boards vertical. On the bottom I had 2 large fans for all the SBCs. (sorry no picture)

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

#48

Post by umaar »

I'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.

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

#50

Post by robotmay »

lloeki wrote: post #34
_gfrc wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'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.stackexc…

Many 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)

I 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.
Post reply on HN