Pi4 Cooling

[dpawson]

Fanshim looks pretty neat. Are the GPIO pins still usable 'above' the n pins used by the fan please?
A bit cockeyed, but still usable?

Is there a fan powered by a.n.other means than GPIO?

[exartemarte]

Fanshim looks pretty neat. Are the GPIO pins still usable 'above' the n pins used by the fan please?
A bit cockeyed, but still usable?

It depends on what you mean by "usable". They're certainly accessible - the shim is very thin and is not soldered. You could connect to the pins with a 40-way ribbon connector or with individual Dupont-style connectors. Some pins are used to control the fan, however, and are therefore not available for other purposes. I'm not sure which they are, but you might find that information on the supplier's website.

Is there a fan powered by a.n.other means than GPIO?

I haven't come across one, but there's nothing to stop you powering a fan from any appropriate power source. It would be permanently on, of course.

[jbudd]

Is there a fan powered by a.n.other means than GPIO?

One of the many aluminium cases on Aliexpress shows fan wires connected to the POE header pins. Presumably two of these pins are connected to 5V and Ground. No idea which, or if you can really power a fan from them though.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000042331060.html
https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/H6004f7abcd4 ... b5f71u.jpg

[dpawson]

Fanshim looks pretty neat. Are the GPIO pins still usable 'above' the n pins used by the fan please?
A bit cockeyed, but still usable?

It depends on what you mean by "usable". They're certainly accessible - the shim is very thin and is not soldered. You could connect to the pins with a 40-way ribbon connector or with individual Dupont-style connectors. Some pins are used to control the fan, however, and are therefore not available for other purposes. I'm not sure which they are, but you might find that information on the supplier's website.

Is there a fan powered by a.n.other means than GPIO?

I haven't come across one, but there's nothing to stop you powering a fan from any appropriate power source. It would be permanently on, of course.

Thanks for that... I'm told that the fanshim Fan and Sense HAT won’t work together, because Fan SHIM uses one of the I2C pins for fan control.

Ah well.

[dpawson]

Is there a fan powered by a.n.other means than GPIO?

One of the many aluminium cases on Aliexpress shows fan wires connected to the POE header pins. Presumably two of these pins are connected to 5V and Ground. No idea which, or if you can really power a fan from them though.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000042331060.html
https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/H6004f7abcd4 ... b5f71u.jpg

Looks neat - I've not come across it before. The GPIO is clear too! If it's a quiet fan that won't be an issue.
Ship to the UK too, unless I can find it in the UK.

Thank jbudd.

[jbudd]

There other cases on Aliexpress which show the fan wires connected between 5V and 3.3V GPIO pins. I don't think that's a good idea.
I guess whoever produced the images just plugged them in at random.

[dpawson]

There other cases on Aliexpress which show the fan wires connected between 5V and 3.3V GPIO pins too. I don't think that's a good idea.
I guess whoever produced the images just plugged them in at random.

Not nice - Is GPIO the only place we can tap 5v on the board? Imples @rpi only ever expected one aux item to be connected at once?
I think you're right about Aliexpress though. All the other fans take the GPIO power. Thanks for the heads up

[alphanumeric]

Fanshim looks pretty neat. Are the GPIO pins still usable 'above' the n pins used by the fan please?
A bit cockeyed, but still usable?

It depends on what you mean by "usable". They're certainly accessible - the shim is very thin and is not soldered. You could connect to the pins with a 40-way ribbon connector or with individual Dupont-style connectors. Some pins are used to control the fan, however, and are therefore not available for other purposes. I'm not sure which they are, but you might find that information on the supplier's website.

Is there a fan powered by a.n.other means than GPIO?

I haven't come across one, but there's nothing to stop you powering a fan from any appropriate power source. It would be permanently on, of course.

Thanks for that... I'm told that the fanshim Fan and Sense HAT won’t work together, because Fan SHIM uses one of the I2C pins for fan control.

Ah well.

https://pinout.xyz/pinout/sense_hat#
and
https://pinout.xyz/pinout/fan_shim#

Other than BCM 3 (wake) I don't see any conflicts. Whether it works depends on whether the wake signal messes with i2c. i

[dpawson]

The conflict info came from Pimoroni, so I guess I must accept it.

[davidcoton]

One of the many aluminium cases on Aliexpress shows fan wires connected to the POE header pins. Presumably two of these pins are connected to 5V and Ground.

No, they are not. They are only for extracting power from the Ethernet cable. The POE power is applied to the Pi through GPIO header pins.

[pica200]

I have done some testing with this case: https://www.ebay.de/itm/New-CNC-Aluminu ... 2321943875

With included thermal Pad and no fan it reaches 78-80°C. Got Arctic Thermal Pads in the mail and replaced the old one and boy does it make a difference. Now it's stable at 68°C without fan! If anyone else buys such a case make sure you buy good quality thermal pads because the china pads are crap.

All tests were done with cpuburna53 at stock clock and no overvolting.

[trejan]

I have done some testing with this case: https://www.ebay.de/itm/New-CNC-Aluminu ... 2321943875

With included thermal Pad and no fan it reaches 78-80°C. Got Arctic Thermal Pads in the mail and replaced the old one and boy does it make a difference. Now it's stable at 68°C without fan! If anyone else buys such a case make sure you buy good quality thermal pads because the china pads are crap.

Not surprising it is awful. The thermal pads I got with my case had one side covered with regular double sided adhesive tape like you'd get from an office supply shop. Their instructions were to peel off the protective layer from both sides and then stick the side with adhesive onto the SoC.

[pica200]

Yeah, ideed. One side was covered in this nasty adhesive. That took a bit to get off the SoC even with 99.9% isopropyl alcohol. The Arctic pads are really good and you get a whole mat of 145x145mm for like 10€. Probably gonna overclock a little bit later but then i need to get a fan since it will surely reach the throttle limit with overclock.

[cspan]

It doesn't need much airflow of the board to cool it quite dramatically. I use the board with no case, and just the airflow around my desk keeps it to 55 or so at idle. Moving it to vertical orientation can drop it another degree or so, as the hot air flow is a bit more efficient rising past the board.

Just a tangential point of reference here ... I noticed an interesting temperature differential on the Pi Zero W that I had just set up with pi-hole yesterday.

It's powered from my router via a short USB to micro USB cable (power only; the cable is an odd one that apparently doesn't do data), and laying atop it while I browse, it gets to 47C. If I instead let it hang off the back of the router in the air (behind my desk, which has an overhang such that it has about 5" clearance to the rear of the desk, and 8" clearance to the room's wall), the Zero W runs at 38C. That struck me as a pretty big difference to get the backside of the Zero W free in the air, vs. laying atop a router.

So for those running a Pi 4 without fans, I can see how orienting it so that it's up on edge could have some advantages. In the air, even more so, but IDK if that might strain connectors. It sure could be inconvenient if you were plugging in and unplugging stuff periodically.

IMG_3527s.jpg (213.17 KiB) Viewed 1028 times

[dpawson]

A fully wired rpi 4 doesn't hang (other than from all the wires).
With Raspberry pi kbd as well, there's little room to hang it anywhere.

I settled on a fan and it's working.

Is there a command line (bash) tool I can use to monitor the temp please?

[cspan]

A fully wired rpi 4 doesn't hang (other than from all the wires).

that's actually what I meant

Is there a command line (bash) tool I can use to monitor the temp please?

perhaps

vcgencmd measure_temp

[dpawson]

thanks, yes.

https://linuxhint.com/raspberry_pi_temperature_monitor/ pretties this up a bit.

[billw]

It seems a lot of people are using fans with their Pi4, but for me having it with no fan was a high priority for silent 24/7 desktop running. A case with its top off and a better heat sink really works fine. It just needs to be mounted in a way that is safer than exposed loosely sitting on a desk. One good way if possible is to mount the Pi on the monitor stand column. I used a heat gun to bend some plastic sheet around a form sized to fit my monitor column and mounted Pi4, SSD, USB hub and power strip on the plastic. I can unplug the HDMI and ethernet cables and short monitor power cord, and in less than a minute it all comes off as a single unit. But a commercial case with top off and other parts could just as well be silicone glued somewhere out of the way directly on the monitor back or stand.

I got an ebay 40mm x 40mm x 11mm heatsink which had no pad or sticky. I could have used arctic pads, but as an experiment, I mounted it with a small amount of thermal adhesive on the four corners of the CPU and a traditional non-adhesive low thermal resistance heat sink compound spread across the middle. I didn't want permanent adhesive all the way across in case I would ever want to try to remove the heatsink. I avoided covering the PMIC by cutting a notch in the heatsink with a hacksaw. I pressed the heatsink straight down to minimize smearing the compound into the adhesive and put a small weight on the heatsink directly over the CPU while the adhesive cured. After curing the heatsink seams secure and works great, but I've not yet tested what it would take to break it loose.

Running the Explainingcomputers stress test in a 26C ambient room, this is what just a little air flow in the room on a larger heat sink can do:

Code: Select all

	  	ceiling		ceiling
still air	fan low		fan med
-----------	-----------	-----------
temp=51.0'C	temp=46.0'C	temp=44.0'C
temp=59.0'C	temp=54.0'C	temp=51.0'C
temp=63.0'C	temp=56.0'C	temp=54.0'C
temp=66.0'C	temp=56.0'C	temp=54.0'C
temp=68.0'C	temp=58.0'C	temp=56.0'C
temp=68.0'C	temp=59.0'C	temp=54.0'C
temp=69.0'C	temp=59.0'C	temp=55.0'C
temp=69.0'C	temp=59.0'C	temp=55.0'C

No CPU fan and no worries about thermal throttling.

rpi4-column-mount.jpg (143.91 KiB) Viewed 932 times

rpi4-40mmx40mm-heatsink.jpg (143.55 KiB) Viewed 932 times

[MisterEd]

Is there a command line (bash) tool I can use to monitor the temp please?

Also, if you want to see the temperature there is a panel applet. The advantage is that the temperature is shown on the taskbar all the time.