Best Pi4 Cases to Overclock With?

[George Spiggott]

I'm looking to buy a Pi4 soon (initially for Lakka) and I plan to overclock it.

What are your opinions on the best case for the job? I'd like to go with an aluminium case that is also fan cooled and as quiet as possible. Is combining aluminium heat sink cases and fans helpful?

[backstander]

@George-Spiggott

What are your opinions on the best case for the job? I'd like to go with an aluminium case that is also fan cooled and as quiet as possible. Is combining aluminium heat sink cases and fans helpful?

Check out this post:
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/post/199379

I'm looking to buy a Pi4 soon (initially for Lakka) and I plan to overclock it.

ETA Prime has several videos running Lakka with an overclocked RPi4:

[hartleyshc]

For a passive case, the best will be the Flirc case.

For active cooling, pretty much all of them will be good enough to keep you running at ~60 and below during OCing. And yes, combining a heatsink and fan will be helpful.

Me personally, I just use the canakit case with no lid, cheapo heatsinks, and I ripped the fan off of an old ATI HD7450 sff card from my junk pile. The fan fits where the lid was perfectly with maybe a 1/4" gap on each side long ways. Maxing out cpu and gpu until my temps plateau, I never go above 67C, which is well below when throttling kicks in at 80C. In real world usage, I have never seen it get above 60C. Granted my fan is bigger than the 40mm most of these active cooling cases come with, but the temp tests seem to be about the same unless you go full overkill with the ice tower.

[Darksavior]

I use a flirc case on my pi4 overclocked to 2Ghz. It's not enough for long term play. Temps were around 70C after an hour of gaming and slowly gaining 1C around every 10min afterwards. Might be able to handle 2-3hrs without throttling but I haven't done extensive testing. Touching it will be super hot. I ended up tying a small ~80mm pc fan to keep temps low. Overclocking definitely needs to be air cooled. The fan I use is slightly bigger than the flirc case, so it's really quiet. I refuse to get those tiny fans aimed at the pi. They're very noisy.

This was using the case out in the open. Inside my dead snes with flirc case and no fan, it throttled a few minutes in. With the fan inside, it stays a stable ~60C.

[George Spiggott]

Thanks for the advice guys. I'll look around for a nice looking case with a quiet fan.