The Pi Hut (who do nice accessories for the RPi) are recommending heatsinks for some of the chips on the RPi board. They supply a thermal-imaging camera picture of the board, with three obvious hot-spots. But there is no temperature scale. Bearing in mind that silicon chips can happily operate at relatively high temperatures (too hot to touch), are heat-sinks recommended?
Philip.
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Philip Draper
Philip@borehamh.demon.co.uk
No. There is no need for heatsinks.
The main chip on the Pi can operate happily at up to 85°C and most distros are set to throttle back any overclocking of the CPU to cool the chip if it gets that high.
I've never managed to get mine higher than 60°C.
The chip is designed to run inside closed cases like mobile phones with minimal cooling.
Many PC CPUs run hotter than that with a huge heatsink and cooling fan! One of my AMD systems is set by default to alarm if the CPU reaches 120°C!
You can use a heatsink if you think it will look pretty ;-)
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