Heatsink Needed?

jay81uk

I was thinking about buying a heatsink for my Pi 3, but looking at videos online, they don't seem to make much difference?

Are they easy to remove once stuck on? They seem to be 99p delivered on an auction site, are those ones ok? Thanks

backstander

@jay81uk

I purchased a CanaKit Raspberry Pi 3 that also came with 2 heatsinks (one for the CPU and one a little bit smaller for the GPU I think) and I feel more comfortable overclocking my Pi with these on there. The Pi does have a built in feature that will display a yellow or red colored square at the top right of the screen when the board is getting hot. I have seen the yellow square a couple of times when playing MAME games for extended times (this is with overclocking settings). One time it was yellow then turned red when I was compiling MAME from source. Now I have a small USB powered fan blowing on my case that is powered by my powered USB hub and I have never seen the yellow or red squares since.

RetroResolution

@jay81uk I have a small aluminium finned heatsink on my overclocked Pi 3's SoC, but the temperature reduction is negligible. I read yesterday that metal heatsinks (as opposed to ceramic) also degrade the wireless performance due to the broadcast of electrical noise and the proximity of the SoC and the antenna.

Elsewhere on the forum someone posted a link to video in which a very large copper heatsink is custom fit d to a Pi 3, which has a dramatic cooling effect, and allows high overclocking to be applied.

mediamogul

@RetroResolution said in Heatsink Needed?:

I read yesterday that metal heatsinks (as opposed to ceramic) also degrade the wireless performance due to the broadcast of electrical noise and the proximity of the SoC and the antenna.

This would explain a lot with mine. Do you think you can find that article again and link it?

RetroResolution

@mediamogul certainly, here you are:

Raspberry Pi 3 Cooling / Heat Sink Ideas

'[Ceramic heatsinks] have the advantage that they won't affect radio frequency (RF) communications as much, when positioned close to the wireless antenna that is present on the Pi 3.'

[Edit] in the discussion thread on the linked blog post somebody notes that ceramic heatsinks can contain ferrous material, and hence are not inherently RF safe

The ceramic heatsinks shown look pretty interesting, and are chreap too.

RetroResolution

@jay81uk regarding removal, here's an illuminating post from the discussion thread on the blog post I linked to, above:

"Brian Welsby Mar 10, 2016 10:33 AM
I have added the following word of caution to my blog:
A word of caution for the inexperienced
The heatsinks we have been discussing are held in place by a thermally conductive adhesive pad. In essence they are glued to the processor chip.
I would recommend that you DO NOT attempt to remove them as any twisting,pulling or prising is likely to damage the chip or its many extremely tiny soldered connection to the PCB"

caver01

@jay81uk Beware of the cheaper options. In a thread a while back, we discussed an overheating issue and it was traced to bad adhesive pads that were not conducting at all. I used a hand-cut section of an old Pentium heat sink attached with Arctic Silver CPU thermal compound and I have never had an overheat issue since (before the heatsink, I would regularly see throttling on many MAME titles).

joaovlg

Hello guys, i'm looking a heatsink on aliexpress - a chinese one (SHCHV - model number C0450). Here is the link http://goo.gl/Sd27a2 --- The point is, i'm not sure if this one, that claims it is a ceramic one, is good enough. The reason is that i live in Brasil and here is expesive import heatsinks like AMEC THERMASOL from a non-chinese site. Add to this the question if the memory chip on the underside can be supplied with the same heatsink as the broacom chip. it seems not be flat.

jay81uk

I'm guessing it's best to get heatsinks from the Pi Hut or somewhere official then?

caver01

@jay81uk not necessarily. As I said, I made mine out of another one. So long as it fits and you get good thermal connection it will work. Mystery tape pads can do more harm than good, but even they can work if they are the right kind. You could get the cheap one and grab some heat sink compound just in case the pads don't work.