Yeah, I know the USP is a small circuit board is cool, but keeping the actual thing cool with a small poxy fan, while sticking a HAT on top - is calling for a much larger box with a better fan, or buying expensive miniature 30mm fans with questionable run time life.
FWIW, the Canakit case with fan using 3.3 volts is inaudible over normal suburban background noise and seems to provide reasonable cooling.
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I bored out the Raspberry logo to admit more inlet air to the fan, the openings in the case seem to provide adequate exhaust to keep the CPU below 70 C even without mounting the provided heatsinks. Right now it's 43 C, running Chromium with 5 tabs open.
On a sunny day (Wed, 9 Dec 2020 18:56:04 +0000) it happened Adrian Caspersz wrote in :
I have been running my Pi 4 since September last year 24/7 in this case:
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First Pi4 Buster, did not even apply any temperature update... raspi95: /mnt/sda2/security/video # temperature temp=41.0'C
raspi95: /mnt/sda2/security/video # uname -a Linux raspi95 4.19.75-v7l+ #1270 SMP Tue Sep 24 18:51:41 BST 2019 armv7l GNU/Linux
The fan started making noises one day, took it apart and added some vaseline (a lot) on the bearings, very quitet since.
No space for a HAT in this housing, and to change the SDcard you have to take the case apart. Also no WiFi comes out of the metal. But reliable it is. What I like about it is that it is closed so no things can get to the PCB and short it.
My old Pi with HAT in a plastic box without fan is much hotter: root@raspberrypi:~# show-temp temp=47.1'C root@raspberrypi:~# uname -a Linux raspberrypi 3.6.11+ #371 PREEMPT Thu Feb 7 16:31:35 GMT 2013 armv6l GNU/Linux Also on 24/7 since about 2013 Last uptime was 275 days or so.. before I had to move it. Reliable stuff.
I have a Pi 4 with an extra heatsink in the standard case that the Pi Foundation provide. It's kept in a cupboard of a TV stand, so an enclosed space with just a small hole for cables at the back, along with a Pi 3 and a spinning hard drive, and a couple of USB TV tuners. The Pi 4 runs at 55 deg C and < 5% CPU usage. I did try running Plex server on it, which is fine for SD recordings which are served as-is (.TS file format) but the CPU usage and temperature shoot up if I try playing HD recordings (again, .TS but it needs to transcode). I forget the figures but I think it was about 65-70 deg C and
50% CPU. Shame that Plex clients (eg on our Roku box) can't handle any .TS file (whether SD or HD) that is sent to them: transcoding on-the-fly to another format seems a very clumsy way to do it. I'm tempted to use VLC on the Pi to play recordings, and dispense with Plex altogether - SD and HD play fine with only a small increase in temp and CPU, but I couldn't get any sound, either over HDMI or out of the 3.5 mm analogue socket, last time I tried. For the time being, I'm running Plex server on a Win 7 PC - even that spins its CPU fan very noisily when it's serving an HD recording.
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