'The Raspberry Pi 4 Needs a Fan'

'Author and programmer Jeff Geerling explains in a blog post why the
new Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan. Unlike previous Pis that didn't
require a fan or heatsink to avoid CPU throttling, the Pi 4 is a
different beast and "pretty much demands a fan," writes Geerling. "Not
only does the CPU get appreciably hot even under normal load, there
are a number of other parts of the board that heat up to the point
they are uncomfortable to touch." After 5 minutes at idle, he recorded
the CPU/System-on-a-Chip (SoC) was around 60C, and it climbed to the
60-70C range when using the USB ports.

"[I]magine if you're truly using the Pi 4 as a desktop replacement,
with at least one external USB 3.0 hard drive attached, WiFi connected
and transferring large amounts of data, a USB keyboard and mouse, a
few browser windows open (the average website these days might as well
be an AAA video game with how resource-intense it is), a text editor,
and a music player," writes Geerling. "This amount of load is enough
to cause the CPU to throttle in less than 10 minutes." So, Geerling
did what any programmer and DIYer would do and decided to add a fan
himself to the official case -- and in addition to the blog post
describing the process, he made a 22-minute-long video showing you
what he did. From the post:

Without any ventilation, it's kind of a little plastic oven inside the
Pi 4 case. A heat sink might help in some tiny way, but that heat has
nowhere to go! So I decided to follow the lead of Redditor
u/CarbyCarberson and put a fan in the top cover. [...] After
installing the fan, I booted the Pi and ran "stress --cpu 4" and let
it go for an hour. The entire time, the CPU's temperature stayed at or
under 60C (140F), a full 20C lower than the throttling point.

There are some other options which may be even easier than modifying
the official case, like the Fan Shim from Pimoroni or purchasing a 3rd
party case with a fan built in. But this option was easy enough and
all I needed to complete the project was a $4 fan and a $7 hole saw
drill bit (which I can use for other projects in the future). '

-- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/19/07/17/2254204

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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