SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Too hot to handle? Raspberry Pi 4 fans left wondering if kit should come with a heatsink
Some early adopters of the Raspberry Pi 4, released on 24 June, are running into heat issues, especially with the official Pi 4 case making no provision for a heatsink or fan.
The Raspberry Pi 4 has a 1.5GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A72 CPU, for approximately three times the performance of the previous model. That inevitably generates more heat.
The Pi does not have a heatsink, but uses what the company calls "heat-spreading technology" to use the entire board as a kind of heatsink. This worked fine for the Pi 3, but the official FAQ for Pi 4 notes:
The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B uses the same heat-spreading technology but due to the much more powerful CPU cores is capable of higher peak power consumption than a Model 3B+. Under a continuously heavy processor workload, the Model 4B is more likely to throttle than a Model 3B+.
You can add a heatsink if you wish, and this may prevent thermal throttling by keeping the chips below the throttling temperature.
When the Pi 4 heats up beyond 80°C (176°F), the CPU is throttled to reduce the temperature and a half-full red thermometer appears on the display, if one is connected. If the temperature goes up beyond 85, the GPU, which now supports dual monitors and 4K resolution, will be throttled as well.
It is no surprise that the Pi 4 gets hotter than its predecessor, it is marketed as a viable general-purpose PC, after all.
There is an issue though: if it frequently overheats in normal use, users are not getting full performance. Longevity of the components may also be affected. We advised in our original review that "things got quite warm" when using the Pi for a few days.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Wierd0n3 on Thursday July 25 2019, @09:47AM (6 children)
This is the cooler i grabbed for mine:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/In-Stock-52Pi-original-ICE-Tower-CPU-Cooling-Fan-for-Raspberry-Pi-4B-3B-3B/173962045147 [ebay.com]
I read the article you posted, all of their numbers were at idle, while this cooler kept it around 20c running prime95 for 20 minutes(the slides they have in the ebay listing were grabbed from eta prime on youtube)
I just grabbed the complete kit from CanaKit, should have the board friday, the heatsink is in shanghai, so soon....... (i hate china shipping)
some people mod their hood to let the supercharger peek out
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday July 25 2019, @10:28AM (1 child)
Yeah, I saw that one. Pretty funny, a nice-looking fan, and will help you to push it to its limits.
I want everything nice and enclosed, and would prefer passive handling of heat. Purchasing the FLIRC Kodi cases supports the XBMC Foundation too. I'm betting that these cases will also be usable with RasPi 5, although I could be dead wrong.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Wierd0n3 on Thursday July 25 2019, @08:35PM
I was planing to have the other heatsinks from the kit take care of that, and i was thinking about seeing if i can power a 120mm fan off of usb2 inside a 1/2 a shoebox since it can now power a usb3 portable HDD and at a decent speed.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday July 25 2019, @10:55AM
http://blog.flirc.tv/index.php/2019/07/24/cases-shipping/ [flirc.tv]
Looks like it may never need to throttle even at 100% with the FLIRC case, depending on other factors. That will need to be confirmed but it looks promising.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 25 2019, @11:20AM
But that monstrosity won't even directly cool the usb chip that also gets pretty hot.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday July 26 2019, @05:01AM
Even the 3 got pretty hot, which is why I run mine in an alu case with a metal pillar over the CPU that turns the case into a heatsink. Shipping the 4 without serious heatsinking is just nuts (although admittedly par for the course for a vendor who runs ethernet over a USB bridge, power via a micro USB connector, no power or USB protection apart from a basic polyfuse, backpowering the system by plugging in a powered USB device, and a million other flaws). Third-party vendors know all about this, look at a vendor like Geekworm [geekworm.com] which is filled with heatsinks, heatsink-equivalent Pi cases, fans, and so on, all the stuff the Pi guys forgot about. Here's one example [geekworm.com], just a solid block of heatsink that wraps around the Pi 4 to make it function properly.
Non-Pi vendors like ODroid, my favourite properly-designed Pi alternative, wouldn't even ship something like a Pi 4 without a heatsink, their Odroid N2 [hardkernel.com] has a massive integrated alu block that's part of the system, you can't even buy it without the heatsink attached.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 26 2019, @06:26AM
I just modified my 3d printed sled. It already has a fan option (20mm or 30mm) just had to switch around the USB2 and Ethernet ports and update for 2 mini hdmi and USBC plug. Will be releasing to thingaverse once I PI4 arrives and I can verify the alignments. Airflow is great since the box is open and sled just slides in.