Raspberry Pi 4 Cooling

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers comm this time I'm going to be conducting some temperature tests and implementing a range of cooling solutions on a Raspberry Pi for specifically I'm going to start out with a pi/4 in its official case say our hot it gets running in here and then after that I'm going to be adding a small heatsink and better I'll put the board into a third-party case with a larger heatsink and then after that I'll be setting up my own far more radical active cooling solution right here we have the Raspberry Pi for be sitting in its official case no heatsink fitted to this is exactly how you get the pipe out of the box so I'll put the top on the case so we've got the PI exactly as it's intended to run in the official case and we'll move to the raspbian desktop and here we are where i've got a script we're going to be using to take temperature measurements throughout the year the video and what this basically does is it tells us it's a bash script at the top it's going to clear the terminal it's going to run a loop so I put a comment saying we're having a loop here's the loop for F in the range 1 to 7 it'll do this seven times and but inside do there it is going to take a temperature measurement and then it's going to run this Syst bench command which is going to factor prime numbers up to a value of 25,000 so it's going to stress out the CPU factoring prime numbers and that should take just under 90 seconds on a PI unless the PI throttle done slows itself down which it will impart to these earlier tests but basically this test should take about 10 minutes to run through consistently reporting temperature measurements and the final temperature measurement on the end you can also say on the screen here at the top we've got the CPU utilization meter currently very low of what is happening the PI's idling along we also got a temperature measurement here as well and you'll see the PI's idling at about 73 74 degrees inside this case that really is very high the ambient air today is about 25 degrees so it's against that context but even so that's very high so with some nervousness I'm going to run this a first test so here's our terminal and I'll start it off and of course I'll now speed on through out of real time and here we are about halfway through I don't normally Paul's halfway through one of these tests but it's worth noting as I'm sure you've seen the PI's clearly throttling it's showing red there in the temperature gauge at the top it's got a little thermometer up on the screen this is not a temperature of posh have been running out I will let this finish but this is not a test I intend running more than once and there we are it's finished and a test that should have taken about 10 minutes took more like a 35 to 40 minutes which means of course the different tests in this video will actually take different periods of time which isn't ideal but the pipe will be performing the same amount of computation in each test and I hope we don't swat like this in the future test with cooling solutions as you can see the PI settled at just about 89 degrees has gone up to 90 at the end and if I open up the box which is very hot inside here it's very very hot indeed but at least we've got a baseline so let's now implement some cooling solutions so here I am back again and as you can see I've now taken the PI out of the case and I fitted it with a very typical raspy PI heatsink this heat sink I think is 14 by 14 by 7 millimeters and a test with a thermal pad to the SOC on the pine and I should say it's now the next day the Pius spent overnight in therapy gearing up getting itself ready for this test and the ambient is now 24 one degree less than it was yesterday anyway let's go back to the desktop here we are and run the script again and straight away we can see the pi is running a lot cooler i let it idle for a few minutes for i started to test and clearly it's ER I think a lot lower than it was previously in the case without the heatsink so let's speed on through for the whole test and there we are it's finished I'm clearly a much cooler result than we had it would - pie in the case it was obviously at its lower throttling threshold throughout a lot of this test lots of orange up here but Noah red and it throttled about 81 82 which is what we saw here so that is settled at about 82 degrees C and the test ran in about 11 minutes rather than a 41 minutes in the previous test so it ran in a sort of time we would expect so clearly this is a good result we've improved things for the PI but let's see if we can now run it even cooler right to lower the temperature even more I'm going to move to a larger heatsink and specifically I'm going to use this heatsink from PI Moroni which is a 40 by 30 fire five millimeter heatsink it's got a heat pad on the back and it'll just about fit on the PI just goes in there it's designed by Palmer Rd for a PI 4 it costs a 2-pound 40 in the UK although it keeps going out of stock don't over u.s. price are yet and be nice to have this mounted on the PI in the case which would accommodate it and in case you're thinking why didn't I try the pie with this heat sink in the official case I don't see any point putting a pie with a heatsink inside a completely enclosed case so we need a case for the PI which will accommodate this heatsink would actually be nice and open have good ventilation and the case I'm going to use is this one here this is a PI Moroni PI bow case these come in various colors this is endangered colors so let's get inside this is a straighter with open I think there we are oh yes I'm just trying it there we are hope don't get inside I thought this would be easy no no oh there we are looking it is inside found it and inside here we have all the pieces to make Carver make a right mess of that didn't I've tied bow case so these bits all fit together to form a case for the PI Tonga put all that together with the larger heatsink and by the magic of filmmaking here we are it's all gone too you can see it's a fits-him between these pieces of a laser-cut perspective sir very nice I wanted to tell you this is a fantastic case I've used these PI bow cases before but I've had a few issues with this well I think the engineering tolerances are pushing things a bit too much to accommodate the PI 4 because here at the top this piece actually snapped just there and if at a piece is snapped off entirely in there and in fact if I show you the edge you might be able to see here at this edge piece here where it is now can entirely separated inevitably comes up here because the HDMI connectors the micro HDMI are bigger than a USB switch that piece I can never quite see that would fit in place and not to stuff off the edge step anyway it will work and as you can see the heatsink is accommodated very nicely very tight fit with the heatsink is there and clearly well ventilated so let's get this thing connected up and then we'll move back to a desktop I'll run our test script for a third time and there we are it's finished and again the test run in just over 11 minutes and in the first half of the test we had no throttling whatsoever but they then got up to pretty much the same set britches in the second half we just put this onto our table of all different results you can see that really we haven't achieved a great deal by the end of the test work but it's better than they the first tests were they hit 90 but I'm now strongly suspecting that we only really start to properly call the rugby PI for B when we applied active cooling right as you can see I've now strips down the PI and I'm going to build an active cooling solution based on a rig but I first constructed in my Raspberry Pi 3 B+ extreme cooling video on which I refined with 3d printed parts in the video called online sweetie printing this rig uses a not chewy NF a 4 X 20 40 by 20 millimeter fan to provide some serious air flow and I'd note that this fan comes in both 5 volt and 12 volt versions and will need a 5 volt version to use on a Raspberry Pi and I will of course include links to everything I use here in the video description now my plan had been to reuse these parts from my previous Raspberry Pi 3 B+ cooling rig with the Raspberry Pi a 4 B but unfortunately this isn't going to work as well as the PI will go on there this part won't fit because of course they've changed the position of the Ethernet and USB ports they flip them over on under pythor beep so what I've done I'm sure you've guessed is to get the parts we printed I've redesigned this this top part I didn't have to have we put in the bottom part but I did I've not added the sticky feet have got on this one yet but I will do that bit later on and this should now fit together just fine that will go in there like that and the knob to a fan will mount on top and power via GPI oh but of course that's only half of the picture I'm still going to need a heatsink and I could use the primer only one that we used in the elastic shut up but this heatsink is a little bit big that way it's a very very tight fit between the camera and DisplayPort and also I know it's very difficult people to get hold of this so I thought what could I do in this rig to get a larger heatsink for the PI something bigger than the small heatsink I've been using and in the previous tests at which people get held up very easily and the thing I've come up with is one of these this is actually an MDOT to drive heatsink this is normally used on a drive like that to a : n dot or SSD and you can buy these online noir kinds of places not these Amazon but lots lots of versions they normally come with a little strip like this a bit of a tape you can attach them to one of you you'll go to cool and this is actually a 70 by 22 by a 5 millimeters they come a different height to make sure you get the highest you can get well not more than about 10 millimeters but I haven't found any more than that five or six high so what I'm going to do is to take this heatsink and to attack it with a hacksaw and I'll end up with a three small heat sinks like these and this is a come out slightly Sun angle at the end but it's about 22 by 28 millimeters this is going to go on to the system on a chip on a pie I've filed all these down got them nice and smooth make sure you clean them off thoroughly after doing that you don't want any sort of metal filings to get onto your pie anyway this will go on a system-on-a-chip and these will go on the ethernet controller and the USB controller on the PI and if we look back to the board just so you're clear what I'm talking about this is the system on a chip which will take a large heatsink but this is the USB controller and this is the ethernet controller and the USB controller in particular gets very warm on a Raspberry Pi for so much so what the Raspberry Pi foundation have now released a firmware thick say a software update to make the USB controller use a little bit less power and hence to run a bit cooler and I did apply that update before I started doing the tests in this video anyway let's now get the heat sinks fitted and there they are may not be the neatest heat sinks in the world but now hopefully do the job on there and now if we take so appropriate nuts and bolts and also Maya sticky feet we can put everything together to hopefully end up with very effective Raspberry Pi for cooling solution and I think it looks rather good doesn't it I've got their sticky feet on the base I like to have those there they the base is nice and wide here because they're as big pi once you've got all the wires connected I find can be a bit unstable so it's good to have a wider base there and you could hopefully see there I've got a good amount of clearance between the top of this the fan and the base party to line things up with the top of the pie but it means I could also try bigger heat sinks in here if I wanted and also the airflow from the fans will hopefully go out him to call the whole top of the book at all three heat sinks everything else there and just in case you're wondering on the wiring the wiring for the fan goes to 10 4 which is a 5 volt well and pin six which is a ground rail and just in case you're also wondering you could put this setup together just using the top part here to get a smaller set up obviously dozen protecting the base to board but that would work as well so now I think it is time to take this a full solution and to get it all wired up and by the magic of filmmaking here we are it's all are completed it all that raring to go so let's now a turn on the power and hopefully the fan is going to spring into action you might be able to hear a slight noise to fund that what a massively noisy fan but so that we've got some fan noise and so I'll now that this run through a few mates just to establish an idle base and then we'll move back to the desktop and run our test script for a final time and there we are it's finished and as I'm sure you'll agree a very good set of results that one was 10 minutes which is the length this test should take to it gone through and as you can see the Pius stabilized at about 55 degrees C was this a new active cooling solution and let's just put that onto the table compared with other results I don't think we need mud shot comparison you can clearly see that using we're not sure a fan for active cooling has worked very well indeed I think I've certainly established the rig the cooling solution but I'll be using with a Raspberry Pi for in the immediate future you over the past few years on this channel I've made several videos featuring cooling solutions for a Raspberry Pi 3 B and 3 B+ and some people in the comments have said Chris did you really to have those solutions do you have to call a Raspberry Pi 3 B and 3 B+ and the answer is possibly not this said now we've got two the Raspberry Pi for some sort of coding solution in my view is absolutely essential at the very least a Raspberry Pi 4 should have a heatsink fitted and if you're using it for intensive computing tasks it really needs an active cooling solution like o shown in this video but now that's it for this video if you enjoyed you've seen here please press the like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and I hope to talk to you again very recent [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 282,119

Keywords: Raspberry Pi 4 cooling, Raspberry Pi cooling, Raspberry Pi 4B cooling, Pi 4 cooling, Raspberry Pi 4 Noctua, Noctua fan, Noctua, Sysbench, heatsink, heat sink, fan, Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi fan, temperature tests, Raspberry Pi 4 temperature, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, Pibow Coupe, Pibow, Pimoroni heatsink, Pimoroni, NF-A4x20, Raspberry Pi heat sink, Raspberry Pi large heat sink, Raspberry Pi large heatsink, large heatsink, large heat sink

Id: AVfvhEJ9XD0

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 21 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/mcgravier]

I see Explaining Computers, I upvote. One of very few "No bullshit" channels on Youtube

[u/slimjourney]

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Official Case	Small HS	Pibow & HS	Noctua & HS
74 °C	53 °C	84 °C	43 °C
86 °C	74 °C	68 °C	55 °C
88 °C	81 °C	74 °C	55 °C
89 °C	81 °C	79 °C	54 °C
89 °C	83 °C	81 °C	55 °C
89 °C	82 °C	81 °C	54 °C
89 °C	81 °C	83 °C	56 °C
90 °C	82 °C	81 °C	55 °C
41 mins	11 mins	11 mins	10 mins

[u/thorskicoach]

I have put a PoE HAT on my pi4, which I should have just ordered at the same time.

It stops the power circuit stuff in the USC-C connection area getting stupid hot.

The fan floats on/off in use. It's whiny annoying, think cheap netbook circa 2012, but works .

I can't see any way to use a pi4 in a case , USB powered, without active cooling for long term stable use.

[u/koji00]

From my own testing, using a fan without a heatsink yields pretty much the same results as using a fan with it. Using the typical fan, I reach 60C under load.

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So, I don't really see the point of a heat sink on the Pi4.

[u/M1chlCZ]

So Noctua is in the game for RPi? Nice : )

[u/TheRackUpstairs]

I'm a little annoyed that in the first step, he both added the small heat sink and also removed the case. I would suspect that the removal of the case would have a larger impact than the heat sink but I can't say for sure and wish it had been split apart to check one than the other

[u/legobotio]

I think it is still worth checking out Microsoft’s active cooling system they have created for the pi 3. I think this will work okay for the pi 4! :-)

Link: https://microsoft.github.io/ELL/tutorials/Active-cooling-your-Raspberry-Pi-3/

[u/Khaare]

From the look of the numbers the heatsinks don't seem to do much cooling by themselves, they just function as temporary stores. I'd like to see how a naked Pi would do outside of the case to see if it too would hold stable at 80º.

[u/perishthethought]

This is very timely. I just got my Pi 4 on the 14th, installed some media player stuff (Plex and other apps), and it ran for about a week then I lost the SD card. Pi refused to boot till I put a newly imaged card in it.

That's not definitely because it was runnig hot, but I know for sure the last time I measured it, I saw a temp of about 85C, so yeah... getting a fan next.