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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Have you tried replacing the SD card with a fresh one with a fresh install and checking if this still occurs? I've had a somewhat similar problem and it turned out to be a dying SD card.
I'm using mine primarily as a streaming device. In my experience a heatsink is more than good enough. Depending on your workload all a fan will do is make a bunch of noise and spread dust around.
I've been doing voice + screencasting on a modern MacBook Pro. The fans seem to intermittently kick at full blast while connected to a 4k external display, or sometimes it's just Dropbox doing CPU intensive things. Either way it's disruptive to the sound, and background noise removal in post doesn't completely fix it.
I've never had to think about heat dissipation so much. Might try a laptop cooling pad.
This is timely for me, I finally am upgrading my original A to a 4! Another advantage of the Flirc case is that it hides the blinking lights which are so tempting for my toddler!
I’ve tested a heatsink case on a Pi4 with and without fans. Without the fans at max load (all cores) it didn’t pass 60 degrees Celsius (20C ambient). So fans are not required.
Why do people use cases on a Pi? I’ve never ever used a case.
My Pis are always out of the way and in a shelf somewhere, untouched until I make modifications to the setup, in which case the case is often coming off anyway.
There are "hardware project RPis" where you're always futzing with the gpio header, and then there are "appliance RPis" that live on top of the router they're connected to via a six inch Ethernet patch cable. A case is common for the appliances.
I'm gonna go ahead and be the shallow person here: I kinda like the look of the cases. It's a shame the official case has the worst heat problem, because it looks the coolest to me.
[+] [-] tosh|5 years ago|reply
""" 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...
[+] [-] jacquesm|5 years ago|reply
Looking through a thermal imaging camera gives all kinds of interesting insights.
[+] [-] sixothree|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rc4hobby|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|5 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] vardump|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kingosticks|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hajile|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] Havoc|5 years ago|reply
I gather the main temp gain isn't the CPU though but rather on the USB charging circuitry.
[+] [-] herogreen|5 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] philliphaydon|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] reitanqild|5 years ago|reply
- 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).
[+] [-] _gfrc|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] arm|5 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] _trampeltier|5 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] meego|5 years ago|reply
Debian wiki has a (pretty bad and outdated) page on the subject https://wiki.debian.org/ReadonlyRoot#Enable_readonly_root
[+] [-] glenneroo|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kingosticks|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roland35|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
No noise, no moving parts, excellent cooling.
[+] [-] digitalsushi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walshemj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ohazi|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] GloriousKoji|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smichel17|5 years ago|reply
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°.
[+] [-] rcarmo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elcomet|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] dannyw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] no_gravity|5 years ago|reply
I have playing with a PI Zero W over the last weeks. At first everything worked as expected.
But now it developed some strange "hangings" I cannot explain. It kinda randomly freezes in time for a few minutes every now and then.
Sometimes it takes several minutes to ssh into it. Sometimes, the terminal just freezes for several minutes.
Neither top nor iostat seem to show any elevated activity during these periods. Since they hang throughout the freeze, its a bit hard to say though.
The strangest thing: Pings to the PI always come back fast. So its probably not that the hardware really freezes completely.
[+] [-] mszcz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsun179|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jstanley|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xrmagnum|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bmurphy1976|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tleb_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] numpad0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjpnz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexellisuk|5 years ago|reply
I compare a number of the different fan / heatsink solutions including pro/cons along with a hacked Noctua fan
[+] [-] umaar|5 years ago|reply
I've never had to think about heat dissipation so much. Might try a laptop cooling pad.
[+] [-] roland35|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] louwrentius|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teddyc|5 years ago|reply
Edit: this is my case
https://chicagodist.com/products/black-raspberrypi-4-armor-a...
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mseidl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dannyw|5 years ago|reply
My Pis are always out of the way and in a shelf somewhere, untouched until I make modifications to the setup, in which case the case is often coming off anyway.
[+] [-] ohazi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Arnt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcarmo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_af|5 years ago|reply