This Case Turns Your Raspberry Pi 4 Into A Pretty Cool Mini Desktop PC!

hey what's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today we're going to be putting together 52 pi's brand new mini desktop tower kit now this actually turns your raspberry pi into a mini desktop and personally i do like the look of this thing but the case that they're including with this kit is 3d printed so if you've got a 3d printer at the house you can actually print the case itself and just buy all the extra components but it also comes with the acrylic side panels but basically what this does is it turns our raspberry pi 4 into a mini desktop comes with an ice tower cooler and an rgb fan we have access to all the usb and hdmi ports on the pi plus they include an oled display and with this we can actually set it up to display the stats of a raspberry pi while it's running or you can add a custom script and show basically anything you want on that little oled so let's go ahead and get this unboxed this is the case portion and like i mentioned the case itself is 3d printed but it also comes with these acrylic side panels with some pretty cool little cutouts on it and there's several different ways you can mount the fan with that ice tower cooler you could actually add several fans in here but i'm going to go with the stock configuration the ice tower cooler and that rgb fan that comes included they've thrown in two oled displays and we'll take a quick look at these acrylic side panels so there's a couple different configurations we can do here but this was really designed for the raspberry pi 4. and they've also got one for a cutout so you can mount that fan directly on the side of this acrylic but like i mentioned i'm just going to go with the stock configuration the included instruction manual is very clear it'll show you exactly how to get this all mounted in here but basically the raspberry pi is going to sit at the bottom of the case there is a cutout for the usb ports and ethernet but unfortunately once we have these acrylic side panels on the side we cannot access the gpio unless you have some kind of extension ribbon cable now this was designed with the ice tower cooler in mind so in order to mount this raspberry pi in the bottom of the case itself we need the hardware from that ice tower we're going to use the smaller standoffs and as long as you put your raspberry pi in here the correct way it should line up we'll just mount the pie down here with the smaller standoffs and then that ice tower will mount directly on top of those but before we move on any further with this review i do want to mention that this video is sponsored by simply nook and their all-new platinum snuck book we have the elite and the pro you can opt for a rtx 3060 or an rtx 3070 gpu and right now simply nook is offering 300 off the platinum snuck books the elite and the pro which makes it the lowest price that these workstations have ever been sold for this mobile workstation is based on intel's all-new x15 laptop platform which means we get that mechanical optical keyboard we've got a glass cover track pad and a full magnesium frame both of these portable workstations are powered by intel's tiger lake 11800h we have 8 cores and 16 threads there with a boost up to 4.6 gigahertz and when it comes to the gpus and the new platinum snucks you can opt for the pro model which contains the nvidia rtx 3060 and six gigabytes of gddr6 vram or the elite model with the rtx 3070 and 8 gigabytes of gddr6 vram these are customizable over on simplynook's website i will leave a link for this in the description we can opt for up to 64 gigabytes of ram and 16 terabytes of nvme m.2 storage they've also got onboard wi-fi 6 and a 2.5 gigabyte ethernet port built in so if you're in the market for a powerful mobile workstation that in your off time you can also play your favorite aaa games on i will leave a link to simply nook's website in the description and remember right now you can get 300 off the elite or the pro which is the lowest price that these workstations have ever been offered for so we've got it mounted in here everything lines up really nicely we'll also have access to that micro sd card but the next thing we need to do is assemble the ice tower cooler and mount it on the raspberry pi cpu now this cooler does come with two different fans you can use the solid black fan or the rgb or you can set up a combo if you want to the next thing we need to do is mount the oled inside of the top of the case here and unfortunately there's no screws i think there would be room to put screws through the front of this thing but in the manual they suggest using a little bit of double-sided sticky tape or hot glue so i opted to hot glue this in here i've just lined it up it's not going to go anywhere but i kind of wish that there were some mounting holes here for that oled that way we didn't need to use any glue or double-sided sticky tape i mean you're not going to see that tape or glue from the outside of the case but it still would have been nice to have some screw mounts here for this oled i've just went ahead and plugged everything into the correct gpio pins it's all listed in the manual and here's the finished product now there's a few different ways we could set this up if you want to we do have these other acrylic side panels that way we could mount two fans in here but personally i just wanted that single fan and this ice tower cooler is gonna keep that pi cpu nice and chilly i mean even if it was enclosed here i think we'd still be good to go even with an overclock i really do like the way this thing looks but let's go ahead and boot it up for the first time and upon the first boot we're not going to get anything on that oled that's because we need to install the correct script and over on their wiki page they do have a full tutorial but i actually ran into some issues with it and i think the reason is because i'm actually running the newest version of raspberry pi os which is based on bullseye and the instructions they have listed is actually for debian buster which is an older version of raspberry pi os so i did run into some issues but i was able to figure it out so i'm actually not going to do a tutorial on this oled on how to get it to display but i'm going to show you a few pointers something that will help you get it up and running really quickly so in the manual it states to head over to their website and follow the instructions here this is going to show the stats on that oled with the newest release of raspberry pi os which is based on debian bullseye i could not get this working it's a few lines that you need to put into terminal and get everything downloaded the only way that i could get this to work was to follow a tutorial from the do it yourself life or the diy life dot com i'll leave a link for this in the description he literally goes through it step by step it's very easy to follow and he also shows you how to get this up and running as soon as you boot and i would highly recommend following this tutorial here especially if you're on bullseye if you're on an older version you can get their tutorial to work but i had a lot of issues with it using bullseye so go with the diy life.com version it's just so much easier and once you have everything installed correctly you're going to get something on that little display like this it's going to show our ip our cpu our memory which is our ram and our disk usage which in this case is a micro sd card now you see that line coming through the screen you will not see this with the naked eye this is banding due to the frame rate on my camera not matching up to the frame rate on the oled but personally i do like this that way i can just take a quick look see what my cpu usage temperature memory usage and my ip is of my raspberry pi 4. so overall assembly is super easy getting that oled display to work correctly was a little bit of a pain but i did find a kind of a work around and it's really because i'm using the newest version of raspberry pi os so if you were using something older it would probably work out just fine with their stock tutorial now since we've added a nice cooler to this raspberry pi i have overclocked it to 2 gigahertz and i did want to see what the temps look like so what i'm going to do is just run a couple stress tests and the main one i usually use is called stress berry i've set it up so it maxes out all four cores on the raspberry pi for 10 minutes and then it just creates a log in the background and i can easily create a chart from that that way we can see how these temps look inside of the case with that ice tower cooler and after a little testing the results are in so with the 10 minute stress test this raspberry pi 4 cpu was overclocked to 2 gigahertz with the ice tower coolers fan on we only hit 45 degrees celsius i unplugged the fan and we only hit 59 and with the ice tower completely removed i mean it hit thermal throttle in 3 minutes and 30 seconds so you definitely want a cooler on your raspberry pi when you're overclocking it but these temps look absolutely amazing and they're not much higher if this was outside of the case i've run tests in the past and we're only three degrees celsius higher with the fan on and it really comes down to those acrylic panels blocking air flow but i mean you're not going to thermal throttle even overclocked with this setup here so in the end i do like the idea of this but there are a few things that i would like to see changed in the future maybe a future revision of this and that would really be those usbs and the ethernet being at the rear of the case i would have loved to see just kind of a clean front on this and even if i didn't have access to that micro sd card i would have kind of been okay with it i know some people really need access to that but even with a little slot there and maybe a pair of tweezers would have been fine instead of having this usb sticking out of the front and really the only other thing that i would change here is the case material now this is 3d printed i'm not a big fan of 3d printed cases for the raspberry pi i mean this is actually a pretty clean job you can see the lines in the front a little bit but if this was some kind of composite material maybe just a plastic injection molded it would have made this a lot cleaner and just looked much better in my opinion but that's going to wrap it up for this one i really appreciate you watching let me know what you think about this thing in the comments below and if you're interested in learning more maybe even picking up a kit i will leave a few links in the description but like always thanks for watching you

Channel: ETA PRIME

Views: 117,121

Keywords: etaprime, eta prime, raspberry pi desktop case, raspberry pi desktop computer, raspberry pi 4 desktop case, OLED, raspberry pi oled display, raspberry pi oled display i2c, raspberry pi oled screen, raspberry pi oled projects, raspberry pi oled hat, raspberry pi oled case, raspberry pi oled status, case, desktop raspberrypi, pi4, new raspberry pi, best raspberry pi cooler

Id: DCo_trDQsYw

Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 26 2021