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

jeffgeerling.com

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

#81

Post by jrockway »

larme wrote: post #28
encom wrote: 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

It's a really, really slow computer. The Pi 4 is something like 10x faster than the original Raspberry Pi, but that was also a really, really slow computer. I remember not wanting to set up a cross compiler once, and recompiled ntpd on one. It took more than 24 hours. The same build runs on my desktop in seconds.

It is good for things like reading a sensor and sending it to some server, but so are ESP32s which are cheaper. You are paying a heavy price to get video output and Linux compatibility. In the current era, it's a bad microcontroller (expensive!) and a bad desktop computer (slow!). When it came out, most people were using $25 MCU boards, so $10 extra to run Linux was a great deal. These days, a massively more capable MCU dev board can be had for $4 (if you want free 2 day shipping, less if you can wait).

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

#82

Post by ilikepi »

jrockway wrote: post #81
larme wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's a really, really slow computer. The Pi 4 is something like 10x faster than the original Raspberry Pi, but that was also a really, really slow computer. I remember not wanting to set up a cross compiler once, and recompiled ntpd on one. It took more than 24 hours. The same build runs on my desktop in seconds. It is good for things like reading a sensor and sending it to some server, but so are ESP32s which are ch…

It's relatively cheap, and it seems to be supported fairly well (loosely, "good"), so that's two points of the triad. The Law says we can't also have "fast", but that's a reasonable trade-off for those who prioritize "cheap" and "good".

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

#84

Post by jrockway »

ilikepi wrote: post #82
jrockway wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a really, really slow computer. The Pi 4 is something like 10x faster than the original Raspberry Pi, but that was also a really, really slow computer. I remember not wanting to set up a cross compiler once, and recompiled ntpd on one. It took more than 24 hours. The same build runs on my desktop in seconds. It is good for things like reading a sensor and sending it to some server, but so are ESP32s which are ch…

It's relatively cheap, and it seems to be supported fairly well (loosely, "good"), so that's two points of the triad. The Law says we can't also have "fast", but that's a reasonable trade-off for those who prioritize "cheap" and "good".

I mean, if you want a build server that runs at Core Duo speeds, you can probably find a used Core Duo workstation or laptop on eBay for less than what a Raspberry Pi costs. While we often talk about how Moore's Law is dead, go back several generations of computers and you'll be impressed at how slow they are. (I'm regularly impressed with how slow current generation computers are!)

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

#85

Post by jacquesm »

tosh wrote: post #41

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…

It'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.

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

#86

Post by digitalsushi »

Up 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.

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

#87

Post by walshemj »

digitalsushi wrote: post #86

Up 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 u…

When 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.

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

#88

Post by hajile »

arbitrage wrote: post #78
hajile wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody's never overclocked their pi before... With an overclock, even a FLIRC would throttle when running our full unit test suite. A 30% reduction in unit test runtime is nothing to sneeze at and I certainly didn't want to downclock to 600-800MHz due to throttling. An ICE Tower was a lifesaver.

by overclock, do you mean full-out running at peak all the time? or letting the CPU governor still work and just bumping up the limits? one makes sense, the other is hubris.

In theory, TDP scales linearly with clockspeed. In practice, power increases higher than that rate. 30-35% increases in heat to dissipate is significant.

I'm old school when it comes to overclocking. Stability and sustainability matter to me. I don't always run all cores full-on for hours, but when I do, I want a cooling solution that's up for the job.

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

#89

Post by teddyc »

louwrentius wrote: post #47

I’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.

Same, 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-a...

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

#90

Post by glenneroo »

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).

At the bottom of this thread the official response from SanDisk support is that all cards except the High Endurance are not supported for Raspberry/Linux:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1158010

I've been using them for the last couple years and haven't had any dead Pis, unlike what happened with a couple other "regular" sd cards.

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