one up laptop

I don't know.

The production laptop isn't expected to be available until late November/early December, so nobody really knows how well the cooling solution will work in practice.

... but if I had to guess ...

It uses a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5, in a fairly confined space, so not much natural airflow. The general consensus of opinion is that a CM5 does need a fan unless its workload is trivial. I expect the laptop's fan won't come on until the temperature passes some threshhold (I have an Argon One case for a Pi4, and that has a fan that works in this way) but I would expect it to be necessary when the machine is under load.

Just because it has a fan, doesn't mean it will be on all the time. I have an rPI5 with an Active Cooler. The fan only comes on during hot days (maybe ambient > 22C) and high CPU. Presumably the laptop compute module CPU is similar.

However, it looks a bit pricey, I would get a second hand laptop, instead.

Thanks. I will wait until the device has hit the wild and await reviews. I saw reviews already but it was tech youtubers who got a preproduction model.

I'd be interested in the keyboard quality. Can't be worse than the pi400's.

The argon 40 studio put up a youtube prototyping vid of the build. Nice rig.

Behind the Build: Prototyping the Argon ONE UP

I wouldn't trust anything from Argon40 again

Thx, It looks as if they don't have a heat sync on the compute module. I would have thought it made sense to use the aluminium case as a heat sync rather than have a fan.

Any ideas why they would design it like that?

The rectangular plate screwing into the bottom of the laptop serves as a heat sync. IIRC, it's a different alloy than the aluminum case. I wish they just made a larger plate and avoid the fan altogether, but that's just me.

Nothing out there makes me fully happy.

What happened, if you don't mind my asking?

I had an Argon One for a Pi4 - great, then when I bought a Pi5 I got their V3 plus the NVME connector.

In principle it is great, but their software install is a pile of spaghetti shell script, and doesn’t really work, although I found an alternative that did.

However their design is flawed, as it uses it's own board that filters out a lot of checks. Their support forum is carp - they just don't respond to anything.

I did get it working, but enough grief for me!

Why not just post a proper link:

This thread has been annoying me. It's 'heat sink'; sync is short for synchronise.

Sorry my fault, I did notice my mistake, but I generally don't correct unless the meaning is unclear.

I didn't find any of that with the Argon One V5 for the Pi 5, maybe because that has a less complex PCIe to NVNe interface. The software install was very straight forward and it worked right out of the box.

The full size HDMIs are very useful as are the front USB ports, and I've got the optional OLED screen as it looks nice. It's also by far the coolest running of my Pi 5's, with its large thermal mass the fan is hardly ever on, even though it is sitting on top of a hot D6000 Display Link box (almost identically sized) for my laptop.

I've also got another Pi 5 in very neat and snaller Argon Neo NVMe case. That does run a bit hotter than a Pi with the official cooler, but it is in a semi enclosed area with other AV equipment, but again that just works great.

I bought both cases from The Pi Hut, and I'd recommend using them for any support issues, rather than the Argon website, particular as it's forum seems to have been taken over by spammers last year.

---druck

IMHO the Pi will always be compromised as a mobile platform until they sort out proper power management in the SoC. You really want to be able to send it to sleep, hibernate, power down different components, etc, but the silicon is not designed for this. Result is that you can make a laptop but it's always going to be eating some power while the lid is closed.

It's maybe fine if you are going to keep it plugged in all the time or use it for short periods away from a wall socket, but the simple thing of folding up the laptop in the evening and picking it up in the morning gets really annoying if the battery has gone flat overnight and you need to restart everything. If you're the kind of person who boots the machine fresh every morning like a desktop PC maybe this doesn't bother you, but that's not what people typically do with laptops.

Theo

Thanks, I do use Pi Hut, and they are excellent

However I believe the ONE V3 is flawed in the way that everything is sealed in, and it overrides the Pi5 power management. Obviously opinions vary!

Sorry, didn't realize.

Because I have you. :)

I have now received my Argon One Up and had the chance to play with it a bit.

The CM5 has a thermal pad to connect it to the metal cover that acts as a heatsink, but the cover doesn't get more than slightly warm in operation. The fan does not come on in normal use, but I should stress that I haven't exactly thrashed the CPU -- I'm not overclocking and I haven't tried any heavily compute-intensive tasks.

The CM5 does not support a power-saving mode, so closing the lid can't put it into a sleep state. When the lid is closed the display is blanked and there is an option to power down after a few minutes (default 5). That's not idea if you're used to carrying a laptop around in sleep state for rapid restart (I'm not: I always power down for security reasons, so it doesn't bother me).

All in all it's a well-made unit. The screen is nice (and bright) and the keyboard is not awful. The touchpad is also not awful, I've used better but I've also used much worse.

One gripe is that the SSD bay has screw holes for retaining an 2280,

I thought, at first, that my webcam was broken, but I discovered that there is a (tiny) slider that puts it into "privacy mode"; with that in the correct position it works nicely.

One quirk I haven't solved yet is that a USB mouse is recognized and works correctly if plugged in after booting, but if it is connected before startup it is not recognized. I have also not yet managed to boot from an SD card (USB stick is fine) but I have only tried one card and there may be an issue with its contents. Reading/writing the SD card after booting from SSD works fine.

I'm not sure that the One Up is very good value with the current crazy prices for Raspberry Pi kit with high RAM capacity and for SSDs (it was good at the kickstarter price) ... but I suppose other laptops will suffer similar price-hikes, too.

Is the fan removable?

My previously new laptop (now my wife's) has that slider built in. On previous laptops I would use the self adhesive plastic slider cam covers that vendors give out at symposiums. Got a pile of them. I was delighted to see laptops including them by design.

Pi500+ is $260 now. I don't dare look at what the one-up cost is.

Daniel sysop | air & wave bbs finger | snipped-for-privacy@bbs.erb.pw