@bison
@TiredOfLife

The new case arrived earlier today.

I've found my Pi 4 runs quite hot without a case, once it's been on a while and especially when under load.

My hope is that the Argon One case being mostly aluminium will absorb and disperse the heat naturally without having to bring the fan online.

Test tonight, results later.

@gryfon

Nice, keep us posted.

Cheers

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@gryfon

The case I linked to earlier in this thread arrived a couple of weeks ago, I ordered the one with two fans.

The case fits very well, is all aluminium, my Pi runs very cool in it, much cooler than without a case and the fans are silent.

btw. ignore the fan connection placement in the amazon pictures, they connected it wrong for the potos.

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@Severin

I waiting for the next model which should run cooler before I upgrade from my 3B+

@bison
@TiredOfLife

All fitted into the new case and ran perfectly out of the box.
The fan is pre-configured to run at:

55c - Fan runs at 10%
60c - Fan runs at 55%
65c - Fan runs at 100%

You can adjust these settings at any time.

Ran the Pi for 3 hours, just casual web-browsing, document editing and a little Pi Minecraft for about 15 minutes. Temp remained at 45-46 degrees most of that time. The casing is warm to the touch, fan never started.

Next: two stress tests to push the temp up. From:

https://core-electronics.com.au/tutorials/stress-testing-your-raspberry-pi.html

Test one over 10 minutes forced the temp up to 57c. At 55c the fan starts and brings the temp back to 53, then back up to 56-57 again, triggering the fan and cool down. This cycle continued until the end of the test. The fan running at 10% is noticeable but very quiet.

Test two is more sustained. The temp was forced up to 58c bringing the fan on, but only 3 times dropping to 54c (turning the fan off) over the 30 minutes of testing.

Overall the temp is maintained brilliantly through a combination of the case dispersing heat and the fan keeping it controlled. It never got hot enough to push the fan to run at more than 10%, so never became noisy.

Impressed and pleased with the results.

Edit:
I understand that the Pi 4 auto-throttles at 80c - which we never came close to. The second stress test is reported to be "unrealistic" levels of CPU use - i.e. in real terms you would never be able to stress the system in a real-world scenario as much as this test would.

Last edited by gryfon on 18-Sep-2019 at 10:37 AM.

@gryfon

Excellent! I think I may go the same route.

Q. Does your Pi 4 boot from USB? Some of the early ones don't, and I'm wondering if they got that fixed yet.

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@bison

Whilst it’s not an “out-of-the-box” feature yet it is planned - I believe the Pi 4 is the first model to have an EEPROM which in the future will be the place to do this.

In the meantime yes you can set USB devices as the boot media on a Pi 4:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=243995

Details are in the link above but make sure you read the whole thread.

Highly recommend my Argon One, an excellent case all round.

@gryfon

Thanks for the link! Here's another:

https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-4-usb-boot-config-guide-for-ssd-flash-drives/

Edit

Passive cooling with FLIRC case and recent firmware update:

Raspberry Pi 4 Passive Cooling

Last edited by bison on 30-Nov-2019 at 11:00 PM.

_________________
"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner

@gryfon

Nice.

Cheers

_________________
If your nose runs and your feet smell, you're upside down.