Water Cooled Raspberry Pi 4 - Totally Unnecessary, But Pretty Awesome

[Music] today i'm going to see if i can use a pc water cooling kit to water cooler raspberry pi 4. i've seen a couple of people try this on all the model parts using reducers and adapters to get a small cooling block onto the cpu but i'm going to try and make an adapter to fit a 12 millimeter tube size cooling block onto this raspberry pi 4. just to be clear this is totally unnecessary and is more of a let's do it because we can not because we should type of project but we'll have a look at how well it works at the end so let's get started i bought a kit which includes 120 millimeter fern and radiator a 12 volt pump a reservoir and some tubing it also included a full size cpu cooling block but this is way too big to try and fit on the part so i'm going to be using one of these smaller 30 by 30 millimeter blocks which can accommodate a half inch or 12 millimeter tubing [Music] let's start out by designing a bracket to hold the cooling block in place on the part we'll need a square section to locate the block and hold it down on the cpu and then some legs off the four mounting holes to hold it in place i've tried to avoid covering the gpio opens and the major components the bracket will be quite high so it won't interfere with any of the surface mount components [Music] i'm going to laser cut the bracket from a piece of three millimeter acrylic [Music] [Music] now that we've got the bracket to hold the heatsink in place let's fit it to the path [Music] the cooling block can't be mounted straight onto the cpu as the display connector is too hot [Music] i've cut a section of aluminium to fit on top of the cpu to space the cooling block away so that it clears the display connector i'm going to use some nylon standoff mounts for the screws which hold the cooling block bracket to screw into i'll hold these in place with some shorter nylon standoffs underneath the power i'm going to use some thermal paste between the cpu and spacer and then again between the spacer and the cooling block [Music] the acrylic bracket is held in place with some m3 by 12 millimeter button head screws [Music] now that we've got our cooling block mounted onto our power we can start working on the rest of the cooling circuits rather than just connecting all of the components together on a desk i'm going to design a stand to mount the water cooling components in raspberry pi 2 so that it looks more complete i'm going to use clear acrylic for the stand with some fluorescent green legs to match the cooling block bracket the water cooling component should just bolt straight onto the sheet once it's been cut out [Music] so [Music] now that we've got our stand components made let's start putting them together i'll start by mounting the reservoir pump and radiator onto the stand [Music] next i need to glue the raspberry pi stand components onto the main cooling water stand i've used this acrylic cement but it's pretty difficult to work with and messes everywhere so i skipped the next 10 minutes or serve me making a mess with the glue i clamped the components in place and allowed the cement to cure for a couple of hours before trying to mount the part once the glue had properly cured i put two lengths of tubing onto the heatsink so i didn't have to try and push them on in the tight space between the pie and the pump [Music] secure the parts of the stand using four nylon m3 nuts on the bottom of the standoffs [Music] [Music] one side of the cooling block goes to the pump and the other to the radiator we also need a section of tube from the radiator to the top of the reservoir [Music] the last thing to do is add a small acrylic block to the base of the pump to hold the weight of the pump in the reservoir the legs on the stand aren't strong enough to support all of the cooling components and i didn't want to make them bigger as i like the look of the thinner sections you'll also hardly notice the block under the pump if it's clear our water cooled pie is now complete we just need to fill it up with water or cooling liquid and try it out [Music] the fan and pump are actually quite quiet the system's a lot quieter than some of the case fans that i've used [Music] let's try doing a stress test to see how well this cooling system works [Music] with the cpu clock frequency set to the default 1.5 gigahertz we started out with a temperature of around 28 degrees i then did a 5 minute stress test at full cpu load there was a small spark initially where the temperature went up to 31 degrees but it stayed between 31 and 33 for the rest of the test and it dropped off quite quickly when the test was stopped here's a graph of the cpu temperature for the duration of the test [Music] now let's try overclock the pi to 2 gigahertz and see if the cooling system still manages to keep the temperature down at the start of the test the cpu temperature was around 29 degrees again it sparked quite quickly when the test started but only went up to 35 degrees it stayed between 35 and 37 degrees for the duration of the test here's a graph of the cpu temperature for the duration of the 2 gigahertz test [Music] so this water cooling system works really well to keep an overclocked powerful cool [Music] remember to subscribe and turn on notifications as i'm going to be comparing this cooling system to an ice tower a basic fan case and then just a heatsink with no fan in my next video to see how they compare [Music] thanks for watching please remember to like this video if you enjoyed it and subscribe for more tech and electronics projects tutorials and reviews

Channel: Michael Klements

Views: 180,177

Keywords: Raspberry Pi, Pi, Raspberry Pi 4, Liquid Cooling, Water Cooling, Cooling, Ice Tower, Heat Sink, Radiator, Overclocked, Temperature, Thermal Test, CPU Test, CPU Load, Computer, Coolant, Lighting, Pump, Reservoir, 120mm Fan, Project, Raspberry Pi Project

Id: fW3VeVe-FJg

Length: 9min 3sec (543 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 16 2020