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Comment by gadgetoid | Hacker News Reader

This pretty much lines up with my findings. I popped the pre-installed heat-spreader off and applied a heatsink with noctua thermal paste... basically no difference- step-by-step chaos here: https://twitter.com/Gadgetoid/status/1151442153584910337

Just adding a small fan (trying to avoid blowing our own trumpet too much here) absolutely demolishes the cooling performance of any reasonably-sized heatsink. Presumably there's just not that much passive airflow over something an inch square, even with convection.

I still wonder what would happen if a full desktop-sized heatsink was coupled to the Pi 4's SOC.

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   I still wonder what would happen if a full desktop-sized heatsink was coupled to the Pi 4's SOC.

In all likelihood, you'd see diminishing returns as you get bigger, but that would be quite the sight to see.

I've been tempted for a while to build a big case with some sort of mounting standard (maybe a Peek array?) so that I can add whatever hardware I want to it (mostly electronics). This seems like a job for that.

I appreciate you actually trying. A "negative" result is still valuable.

What I don't like about the article is that small fan have to spin fast (= noise) to generate enough flow. I'd much rather use a 80 mm fan, slowed way down, but I suppose I'd had to roll my own case for that. Better still, wait for someone to start offering this (or maybe this: http://blog.flirc.tv/index.php/2019/06/24/new-pi-4-cases/)

I'm not the best judge, but these are really quiet fans. I can hear the ones in my laptop, but don't notice Fan SHIM at all. We've had a couple of customers who have, but a replacement fan has been quiet- guessing it's a tolerance issue with the plastics.

convection cooling needs a decent gap between the fins for it to really work. This is why something like Noctua's passive cooler ( https://www.anandtech.com/show/14486/noctua-shows-off-concep... ) looks totally different from their tower coolers with a fan.

Just slapping a normal CPU heatsink on the pi4 will probably work OK just do the thermal mass and exterior surface area of it, but you're probably not going to get much convection-cooling from it, either.

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