vertical orientation also seems to impact temperature
"""
Simply moving Raspberry Pi 4 into a vertical orientation has an immediate impact: the SoC idles around 2°C lower than the previous best and heats a lot more slowly – allowing it to run the synthetic workload for longer without throttling and maintain a dramatically improved average clock speed.
There are several factors at work: having the components oriented vertically improves convection, allowing the surrounding air to draw the heat away more quickly, while lifting the rear of the board from a heat-insulating desk surface dramatically increases the available surface area for cooling.
"""
It's not that simple in the general case though: putting a board vertical will cause the top of the board to be hotter than the bottom, possibly a lot hotter than it would have been in a horizontal position even if the average temperature of the board is a lower one!
Looking through a thermal imaging camera gives all kinds of interesting insights.
Thermal engineer here. There absolutely no need to use fan cooling, humongous heatsinks or harebrained temperature controller schemes to cool the raspberry pi 4.
All that is needed is a small heatsink to slightly decrease the thermal resistance to ambient air, to stay below the thermal throttling threshold.
Anything more complicated than that is a pointless exercise in pointlessness.
Did you read the article? He tested a heatsink. I'll quote the relevant part.
> Heatsinks will generally shave 5-10°C off the highest temperatures you encounter, which is significant, but you still need to have air moving across the heatsink for it to do anything. This means either a fully open Pi (great for testing or tinkering, not so great for a semi-permanent installation), a well-ventilated case (with slots or holes in the bottom and top to allow natural convection), or a fan. So not a bad choice, and they're so cheap you should probably stick them on any Pi you can... but heatsinks alone won't solve Pi cooling problems.
He doesn't have much of a methodology and seems to have missed a key point of the heatsink: orientation.
If he'd mounted his Pis' GPIO parallel to the ground, heatsink fans perpendicular to it, he would have found his missing convection with or without a heatsink.
This is what I do, and mine haven't reported >45`F ambient under peak load in a passively ventilated area. There is no issue with heat removal with enough air space.
Would you describe that flirc case as complicated? To a naïve layman, it seems like the smallest all-metal case that'll fit the rpi4, made so that the metal acts as a heatsink. Which may be more heatsink area than a 15W CPU needs, but not bigger case area than is needed. Is there something I'm missing?
I got a pi 4 around 6 months ago and got the flirc case based on the recommendation of TFA. I've been very pleased with it - makes the pi look nice; I no longer worry about other people touching it; and of course it cools well (the very thick thermal pad connecting to the case is a bit unusual, but it works).
I got the flirc usb dongle for remotes at the same time, since I thought I'd want it (my pi is a media center) and there was a discount at the time if you bought both it and the case.. I've been far less impressed. It's a great idea in theory, but in my experience there was enough flakiness/delay with each button press, especially with Kodi for some reason, that it was basically unusable. Also, their utility for programming the dongle did not run well on the pi itself (it stores configuration on-device so you don't need to program it from the device you'll be using it on), and the install process involved setting up a repo that is served over http and does not have an associated gpg key, which gave me a bad feeling (although overall it felt more like a startup flying by the rest of its pants than anything malicious). I am somewhat hopeful that with more time/polish these issues will be fixed in software, but can't currently recommend it.
I believe the FLIRC case is custom designed for the RPi4, not just "happens to fit" as you imply. Otherwise you have it correct; it's an aluminum case that mates down onto the CPU for direct passive cooling.
Note that it's clearly an injection-molded aluminum top-half and the bottom-half is plastic, just used to keep the dust out.
I would describe it as simple and elegant; fit for purpose.
Otherwise I'm quite happy to have a full passive cooling config, as currently my RPi home server must live in the kitchen/dinning room area due to space constraints.
This is basically an appeal to authority. You haven't explained what property of the Raspberry Pi 4 means that a tiny heatsink is sufficient. Why can't I just replace the words "raspberry pi 4" with anything else and conclude that I never need fans or large heatsinks?
Because you can see in the graphs that the bare pi doesn’t get that hot. If you allow just a bit more heat to escape you push the graph down to where the peak sits just below the throttling point.
For home/hobby use this doesn’t matter too much but you typically want to run as hot as allowable. It’s a win-win since small heat sinks are cheap and don’t have any moving parts.
Fan cooling a Raspberry Pi 4 is such an odd thing to do. You are essentially taking one of the pros of the Pi - quiet and reliable operation - and replacing it with a moving part that will not offer too much benefit and will eventually wear out or start having issues.
With an overclock, even a FLIRC would throttle when running our full unit test suite. A 30% reduction in unit test runtime is nothing to sneeze at and I certainly didn't want to downclock to 600-800MHz due to throttling. An ICE Tower was a lifesaver.
My issue with heat management is dust (on fan), also I live in the equator line area that makes it very hot in the afternoon (makes heat sink less effective).
That makes me think a lot before choosing passive or active cooling.
The Flirc case-as-heatsink one seems good tho, and on-line with your statement
The article is dated November 22, 2019, which makes me wonder whether it was before the Raspberry Pi 4 firmware upgrade that reduced heat generation quite a bit.
My two 4GB Raspberry Pi 4s have had no thermal issues. Running the same measurement script now, will report back the results.
Edit: Ok, done with the tests. Both RPi4s are bare and should be running exactly the same versions.
RPi4 #1 started at 51C, peak 79C, no throttling at any point. Ambient temperature 24C.
RPi4 #2 started at 54C, peak 82C at which point it started to throttle. Ambient temperature 27C.
I haven't closely followed RPi4 firmware development, but I did notice positive changes since June 2019. I think there have been at least two occasions that dropped the (idle) operating temperatures.
In any case, I'm happy with their thermal performance.
TDP theoretically scales linearly with clockspeed and scales worse in reality. Most Pi 4 can sustain 2.1GHz CPU and 650-750MHz GPU. That's a 30-35% increase in clockspeeds. If I'm taxing the system, even a FLIRC case will throttle on my pi. ICE tower has done an amazing job and the sound isn't noticeable on 3.3 volts. In fact, you can simply unplug the fan and passively cool (though it'll throttle after a few minutes at peak clocks).
I used the pi for dev work for a few weeks as an experiment. Overclocking is the single-biggest improvement you can make. An overclock combined with the IPC improvements from a 64-bit OS, and load improvements via SSD, the system is probably 75% faster which is a huge deal at that performance level (the difference between extremely frustrating and just mildly annoying at times).
I've been running a raspberry 3 with a cheap sandisk sd card for years now without any SD Card issues. It runs a DNS based ad-blocker and a vpn.
I am logging everything to ram instead of writing it to the card and that's about it. I never encountered any issue with SD Card reliability, despite me sometimes just pulling the plug instead of properly shutting it down.
I do have a couple of other raspberries for other uses (e.g. a small rc car) which are also running on their first SD card. Might be just luck, but I do think that it's not necessary to go to extreme lengths to have them run reliably.
Many problems with SD cards are actually rooted in power issues (bad power source or usb device that eats power). Ever since I took proper measures to ensure stable enough power I've had no issue (Pi 3B here)
Regarding microSD card reliability, one option would be to simply forego the microSD card completely and boot the Raspberry Pi 4 via an SSD connected to one of the Raspberry Pi’s USB 3.0 ports.
I was originally going to recommend checking out this¹ article for instructions on how to do it. However, much of the instructions are no longer valid (as of two weeks ago!) since they assume that the Raspberry Pi 4 doesn’t natively support booting from USB, which finally isn’t the case (although only if you use the current beta bootloader²). I’d still recommend reading it though, as it also mentions known working 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.0, M.2 NVMe to USB 3.0, M.2 SATA to USB 3.0, and mSATA to USB 3.0 adapters. In addition, I’d recommend checking out this³ article with some recommended SSDs; in particular, this⁴ 120 GB Kingston A400 SATA 3 2.5” Solid State Drive coupled with this⁵ StarTech 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.0 Adapter, which also has the added bonus of giving you far better speeds than a microSD card would! As the author of that article mentions:
“The Kingston A400 drive performs really well in the Raspberry Pi Storage Benchmarks⁶. It’s a great drive and is cheaper than many mid-range MicroSD cards.
The 2.5″ SATA to USB adapter above allows us to do this. There is no power adapter needed as SSDs are low power and are powered by the Pi through USB.
Ah, just saw that Jeff Geerling (the author of the linked article in this HN post) also has an article about booting the Raspberry Pi 4 from an SSD located here¹ (HN thread here²).
For 2-3 years I had a tower (1m height) with 8 RP3s, 4 thinker boards and about 12 Orange Pis (different models). I did run different BOINC projects on it. So the load was 100% 24/7.
The whole time I had 1 or 2 broken SD cards. Temperature was never an issue.
I put on all SBCs just a passive heatsink (about 30x30x20mm). I installed packs with 4 boards vertical. On the bottom I had 2 large fans for all the SBCs. (sorry no picture)
A good approach used in industrial/embedded applications: use a read-only root volume. If you don't write to your SD, you don't wear it out and have no risk of file system corruption either. It's quite a lot of work though, since most packages assume they're installed on a writeable file system.
At the bottom of this thread the official response from SanDisk support is that all cards except the High Endurance are not supported for Raspberry/Linux:
The easiest is to eliminate the SD card by either booting from network, move the rootfs to a USB drive, or boot from a USB drive (now available for Pi 4 with beta firmware). These are documented at https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...
My original pi has been corrupting SD cards all the time, especially now that I am running pi hole on it which seems to need more RAM than is available on my old board.
Up here in NH it gets a little chilly in the barn loft where the server rack is hiding inside an old credenza. A chicken egg incubator on a heat switch keeps the spinny disks on the NAS above 35F and it turns off at 45F. It only turned on a few times during the coldest days last year. I dont know for a fact whether spinny disks like to be above freezing but anecdotally someone said yes and it was 12 bucks to set it up.
The flirc case is a giant heat capacitor, not a heat sink.
Notice that it has the only temperature curve where the temperature does not go back to baseline after the stress test. It needs a lot longer to get to equilibrium, and the final temperature is almost certainly hotter than what's shown on the graph.
There's still a good increase in surface area for convection it's definitely a heatsink. The graph does a poor job showing this but the start and stop idle time is 5 minutes. That's a good amount of time for temperature to settle.
I own one. To some extent you're right. My pi runs mpd and pi-hole at all times and under that relatively low load, the case is constantly warm to the touch. But it has enough surface area that I've never been worried about overheating. Refer to TFA -- a tiny little heat sink on the cpu was all that was need to keep from throttling.
I don't have the hardware to give a proper surface temp reading. I can measure the pi's reported temperature / test for throttling under extended load later, but for now: I stuck an "instant"-read thermometer intended for cooking into one of the usb ports, which was the hottest place I could find on the case. It measures 36.1°, compared to an ambient temp of 23.4°.
I have been running one for a few months, and it does get consistently warm, but does not throttle the CPU (at least for my workloads). Will be setting up a second one as a “workstation” soon.
exactly. For passive heat sinks, you need big surface areas. The FLIR case doesn’t do that and is arguably one of the worst options esp considering its price.
Readit News
""" Simply moving Raspberry Pi 4 into a vertical orientation has an immediate impact: the SoC idles around 2°C lower than the previous best and heats a lot more slowly – allowing it to run the synthetic workload for longer without throttling and maintain a dramatically improved average clock speed.
There are several factors at work: having the components oriented vertically improves convection, allowing the surrounding air to draw the heat away more quickly, while lifting the rear of the board from a heat-insulating desk surface dramatically increases the available surface area for cooling. """
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/thermal-testing-raspberry-p...
Looking through a thermal imaging camera gives all kinds of interesting insights.
All that is needed is a small heatsink to slightly decrease the thermal resistance to ambient air, to stay below the thermal throttling threshold.
Anything more complicated than that is a pointless exercise in pointlessness.
> Heatsinks will generally shave 5-10°C off the highest temperatures you encounter, which is significant, but you still need to have air moving across the heatsink for it to do anything. This means either a fully open Pi (great for testing or tinkering, not so great for a semi-permanent installation), a well-ventilated case (with slots or holes in the bottom and top to allow natural convection), or a fan. So not a bad choice, and they're so cheap you should probably stick them on any Pi you can... but heatsinks alone won't solve Pi cooling problems.
If he'd mounted his Pis' GPIO parallel to the ground, heatsink fans perpendicular to it, he would have found his missing convection with or without a heatsink.
This is what I do, and mine haven't reported >45`F ambient under peak load in a passively ventilated area. There is no issue with heat removal with enough air space.
I got the flirc usb dongle for remotes at the same time, since I thought I'd want it (my pi is a media center) and there was a discount at the time if you bought both it and the case.. I've been far less impressed. It's a great idea in theory, but in my experience there was enough flakiness/delay with each button press, especially with Kodi for some reason, that it was basically unusable. Also, their utility for programming the dongle did not run well on the pi itself (it stores configuration on-device so you don't need to program it from the device you'll be using it on), and the install process involved setting up a repo that is served over http and does not have an associated gpg key, which gave me a bad feeling (although overall it felt more like a startup flying by the rest of its pants than anything malicious). I am somewhat hopeful that with more time/polish these issues will be fixed in software, but can't currently recommend it.
Note that it's clearly an injection-molded aluminum top-half and the bottom-half is plastic, just used to keep the dust out.
I would describe it as simple and elegant; fit for purpose.
Otherwise I'm quite happy to have a full passive cooling config, as currently my RPi home server must live in the kitchen/dinning room area due to space constraints.
For home/hobby use this doesn’t matter too much but you typically want to run as hot as allowable. It’s a win-win since small heat sinks are cheap and don’t have any moving parts.
With an overclock, even a FLIRC would throttle when running our full unit test suite. A 30% reduction in unit test runtime is nothing to sneeze at and I certainly didn't want to downclock to 600-800MHz due to throttling. An ICE Tower was a lifesaver.
one makes sense, the other is hubris.
That makes me think a lot before choosing passive or active cooling.
The Flirc case-as-heatsink one seems good tho, and on-line with your statement
My two 4GB Raspberry Pi 4s have had no thermal issues. Running the same measurement script now, will report back the results.
Edit: Ok, done with the tests. Both RPi4s are bare and should be running exactly the same versions.
RPi4 #1 started at 51C, peak 79C, no throttling at any point. Ambient temperature 24C.
RPi4 #2 started at 54C, peak 82C at which point it started to throttle. Ambient temperature 27C.
I haven't closely followed RPi4 firmware development, but I did notice positive changes since June 2019. I think there have been at least two occasions that dropped the (idle) operating temperatures.
In any case, I'm happy with their thermal performance.
I used the pi for dev work for a few weeks as an experiment. Overclocking is the single-biggest improvement you can make. An overclock combined with the IPC improvements from a 64-bit OS, and load improvements via SSD, the system is probably 75% faster which is a huge deal at that performance level (the difference between extremely frustrating and just mildly annoying at times).
I gather the main temp gain isn't the CPU though but rather on the USB charging circuitry.
Also there a few model of cases on ebay/aliexpress that would be interesting to test such as https://m.aliexpress.com/item/4000509636456.html (with a heatsink added)
https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/1200x900/4340-08.jpg
It never gets hot that I can't touch it.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000392602236.html
- SD card reliability
- techniques for reliably using what we have
?
Given that people are using these for all kinds of stuff there must be some advanced techniques being used (or some basic I have missed).
I am logging everything to ram instead of writing it to the card and that's about it. I never encountered any issue with SD Card reliability, despite me sometimes just pulling the plug instead of properly shutting it down.
Here is a simple guide: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/62536
I do have a couple of other raspberries for other uses (e.g. a small rc car) which are also running on their first SD card. Might be just luck, but I do think that it's not necessary to go to extreme lengths to have them run reliably.
I was originally going to recommend checking out this¹ article for instructions on how to do it. However, much of the instructions are no longer valid (as of two weeks ago!) since they assume that the Raspberry Pi 4 doesn’t natively support booting from USB, which finally isn’t the case (although only if you use the current beta bootloader²). I’d still recommend reading it though, as it also mentions known working 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.0, M.2 NVMe to USB 3.0, M.2 SATA to USB 3.0, and mSATA to USB 3.0 adapters. In addition, I’d recommend checking out this³ article with some recommended SSDs; in particular, this⁴ 120 GB Kingston A400 SATA 3 2.5” Solid State Drive coupled with this⁵ StarTech 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.0 Adapter, which also has the added bonus of giving you far better speeds than a microSD card would! As the author of that article mentions:
“The Kingston A400 drive performs really well in the Raspberry Pi Storage Benchmarks⁶. It’s a great drive and is cheaper than many mid-range MicroSD cards.
The 2.5″ SATA to USB adapter above allows us to do this. There is no power adapter needed as SSDs are low power and are powered by the Pi through USB.
”――――――
¹ — https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-4-usb-boot-config-gu...
² — https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/boot-raspberry-pi-4-usb
³ — https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-storage-benchmarks-2...
⁴ — https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N6JQS8C/
⁵ — https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HJZJI84/
⁶ — https://storage.jamesachambers.com/
――――――
¹ — https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/im-booting-my-raspber...
² — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23471729
The whole time I had 1 or 2 broken SD cards. Temperature was never an issue.
I put on all SBCs just a passive heatsink (about 30x30x20mm). I installed packs with 4 boards vertical. On the bottom I had 2 large fans for all the SBCs. (sorry no picture)
Debian wiki has a (pretty bad and outdated) page on the subject https://wiki.debian.org/ReadonlyRoot#Enable_readonly_root
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1158010
I've been using them for the last couple years and haven't had any dead Pis, unlike what happened with a couple other "regular" sd cards.
No noise, no moving parts, excellent cooling.
Notice that it has the only temperature curve where the temperature does not go back to baseline after the stress test. It needs a lot longer to get to equilibrium, and the final temperature is almost certainly hotter than what's shown on the graph.
I don't have the hardware to give a proper surface temp reading. I can measure the pi's reported temperature / test for throttling under extended load later, but for now: I stuck an "instant"-read thermometer intended for cooking into one of the usb ports, which was the hottest place I could find on the case. It measures 36.1°, compared to an ambient temp of 23.4°.
But overall, this case is still better than bare pi, or regular plastic case (the heat capacitor has much larger surface than the cpu of the pi).