Good cases for the Pi4?

Weatherby

@barbudreadmon My Pi3 has started having heating issues, and is generally a bit wonky at this point. Since 4.6 is now supported as a beta on the Pi4, I figured it's time to throw in on a new build. Mostly I want to play up to PSX games without worrying too much about heating issues (that's where I really start to have a problem on my 3, though it depends on the game.) Dreamcast games are definitely interesting, though, so I might end up overclocking.

In any case, I went with the Argon One case. Seems like it's pretty solid on cooling all around. Unfortunately it's shipping from china so who knows when the hell it'll get here.

Clyde

@Weatherby said in Good cases for the Pi4?:

In any case, I went with the Argon One case. Seems like it's pretty solid on cooling all around. Unfortunately it's shipping from china so who knows when the hell it'll get here.

Did you order there for a low price or are there no domestic sources in your area? I'm asking because German online stores do have the Argon cases in stock.

Brunnis

@barbudreadmon said in Good cases for the Pi4?:

@Brunnis said in Good cases for the Pi4?:

I think N64 temps are 60-65C

Again, i don't think it's a good reference, iirc, even on pi2, the bottleneck of n64 emulation wasn't the cpu, which means the charge must be pretty low on pi4. There are emulators that'll stress the cpu a lot more.

Yeah, I know. Just giving the figure as a reference. The sysbench 4 core load is probably much closer to a real world worst case for emulation, in terms of temps. Most emulators won’t put that kind of load on the SoC though.

Jiryn

I'm using the Flirc case, as was suggested to me last year
https://flirc.tv/more/raspberry-pi-4-case

Weatherby

@Clyde No domestic source, from what I could tell. The price was comparable everywhere I was looking too.

pojr

Jiryn

@pojr Exactly what I am using!

Ka

Thinking about getting an Argon One case for my Pi 4. Stupid question - I’ve already got some stick-on heatsinks on my Pi board. Would I need to remove these for the Argon case to fit? It looks like it’s a tight fit.

pojr

@Jiryn
i absolutely love the case. it provides the bulk that i need. i had to remove the fan though. did you? not that it has been an issue without the fan.

jandalf81

@Ka Yes, you will need to remove the heatsinks, as there are two protusions inside the case which directly touch the CPU and GPU for optimal heat flow. See here for reference at 2:10:

pojr

The argon one case is probably the best one ever made for the pi 4 right now, but sadly its sold out...and places like ebay are selling it for too much. its really only a $25 case, shouldn't be sold for $40. the flirc case is probably the next best thing.

Clyde

I just got my Argon NEO. Its overall quality is superb, except that one of its two magnets was loose and I had to glue it back on with metal glue.

Alas, I don't have that much time for setting up Retropie 4.6 and transfer my old installation from my Pi 3 at the moment, so it may be some weeks before I can say something about the performance and thermal effects of the Pi 4 in the NEO case. But I will post them here eventually.

Ecks

@Ka said in Good cases for the Pi4?:

Thinking about getting an Argon One case for my Pi 4. Stupid question - I’ve already got some stick-on heatsinks on my Pi board. Would I need to remove these for the Argon case to fit? It looks like it’s a tight fit.

Yes you would have to since the case is it's own heatsink as well.

Ecks

@pojr said in Good cases for the Pi4?:

The argon one case is probably the best one ever made for the pi 4 right now, but sadly its sold out...and places like ebay are selling it for too much. its really only a $25 case, shouldn't be sold for $40. the flirc case is probably the next best thing.

the low profile ice tower is great as well cause it does include an acrylic plate for under the Pi and you could also make your own case if you wanted for the Pi since it does include the stand offs under it and heck since we have all the time in the world right now cause of what is going on we could even make something like this as an example for the Pi.

alt text

IceChes1

I wanted an Argon ONE but since I'm a 12-year-old that would really break the bank for me. I eventually settled on one on Amazon by a company called Pastall. It is aluminum and has a fan. It's only $16 USD.

Izzi

@barbudreadmon said in Good cases for the Pi4?:

@Darksavior said in Good cases for the Pi4?:

I keep mine at 1950Mhz

You can now push it to that freq with a fanless flirc case ? No throttling ? That wasn't possible until recently, right ?

Yeah. I have a Flirc too and I'm overclocked to 1900 arm core and 750 gpu core. Thermals cap around 60~65º after an hour or so of gaming.

Riverstorm

I've had good luck with the Argon One / Pi 4. The best part is having all the ports rear facing making cable management a breeze and easy to hide. No more infamous Pi cable spiders! ;) The fan can be slightly loud at 100% in a quiet room when working next to it.

@barbudreadmon - I did some testing with the link provided using the settings below. The first test completed in 919s (but it keeps running) leveled off around 57-58C (fan at 10%).

over_voltage=6
arm_freq=2000
gpu_freq=750

CPUBurn pushed it a little harder and it leveled off around 64-66C (fan was jumping between 50-100%) . The fan is set to run at 55% below 65C and 100% at and above 65C. The fan speed could be tweaked for a more consistent temp as it was right on the boundary.

I did the latest firmware update before testing. It seems 2GHz is solid on this board. I'm going to do a few more tests over the weekend for stability before trying to go above 2 GHz. Ambient was around 73F/22.7C.

Clyde

@Riverstorm Thanks for the detailed results. As for the cable spiders, it depends on the application of the Pi. In my upright arcade cabinet, having the cables not on only one side actually helps to spread them out between the different components. 😊 That's why I usually prefer cases that don' t change the socket layout.

Riverstorm

@Clyde - Hey Clyde, how's Germany holding up with the pandemic and all? That's a good point the orientation might facilitate your build but those Argon cases aren't meant to be hidden away in cabinets. That would be a sin! ;) They are well built with a nice finish and meant to be displayed. :) If I was going to mount a Pi in an upright cab I think I would go for one of those cheap acrylic cases/plates or make a cheap balsa wood plate or something.

I had one minor issue with the Argon One/Pi 4 and that was with mounting the board inside the case. The standoffs that hold on the bottom plate were to close together. I could either file the finish off the standoffs or file the PCB. I chose to file the PCB just in case the removed finish wasn't enough to fit the board down flush and I had to file both the standoff and PCB. It was less than a one MM and it took only a small round file to do the trick. I don't know if it was just an early run manufacturing variance or something but the Argon One for the Pi 3 case was a perfect fit.

The other really nice thing about the Argon One is the power button. After you load the script shown in the manual it integrates extremely well with RetroPie. You press the power button to turn it on and you're right at the ES menu. When done gaming just go through the RetroPie menu to shut it down and it will shut down properly and kill the power to the Pi just like a console. It's real clean powering up and shutting down. It feels like a true mini console minus any branding. ;)

You can also hold the button down for a graceful shutdown or longer to do a hard shutdown. I think it's the 3 to 5 second range. I was looking to change the times between a graceful shutdown and a hard shutdown but found a comment from a guy that wrote the company and they said they are hard coded values and can't be changed.

The fan is a user set percentage of the fans max RPM's based on 3 temps 55, 60 and 65. So you don't have full flexibility. It's set through a script so maybe it can be modified if those values don't work for your setup. The defaults have worked ok for me.

On a side note after a whole lot of testing I did get the Pi 4 stable at 2.1GHz with these settings:

over_voltage=6
arm_freq=2100
gpu_freq=750

I used the overclock link provided by @barbudreadmon. At 2100 the temp topped out at 68C with CPU Burn in the Argon One. I would give a bit of room around the case due to it getting really quite warm to hot once the fan starts revving up.

Then I went through and compiled from source Retroarch, Emulationstation, Advmame, Daphne, FBNeo, mame2003-plus and several other emulators with no crashes. Compiling from source was the only other thing that would get the Argon case hot enough to kick the fan on.

I played a bunch of arcade games, Dragon's Lair, N64 games, etc. with no issues.

Finally I did the @quicksilver Quake 3 stability test with max bots in spectator mode for 12 hours straight with no issues at all. I started it before going to bed and it was still running fine when I got up so I let it go several more hours before calling it good. If the overclock is unstable I can usually get it to crash or lockup with Quake anywhere from 0 to 4 hours and if it makes the full 12 hour run I call it good.

It's been 100% stable at 2.1GHz all weekend. I also did try 2147 but it was locked up after the first overclock test. So the real number is probably somewhere between 2100 and 2147.

Clyde

@Riverstorm I'm well, thanks, and you? Germany seems to be one of the best places to be in these times if you believe the official numbers (which I do for the most part). There are moderate measures against the pandemic in place, like having to wear masks when shopping, or keeping your distance of approx. 1.5 to 2 meters, but they are bearable in comparison to those in other countries (edit: at least for myself, since my job isn't one of the cut-off lines of work).

Aaaanyway … coming back to topic, I surprisingly got around to setup my Pi 4 over the last weekend. It is now the new heart of my upright cabinet. Since I used it mostly for arcade and console games from the 70s and 80s, there was no sudden burst of speed to notice, but even without any overclocking yet, all of my beloved PSX games do run now at (mostly) stable 60 Hz without any of the sound stuttering I was used from my non-overclocked Pi 3B.

I didn't do any overclocking or thermal tests so far. I did overclock the Pi 4 in its passively cooled Argon Neo case for a short time to 1750 Mhz at an overvoltage of 2 without any throttling according to watch -n 1 vcgencmd measure_clock arm, but since this didn't have any noticable benefits in my PSX games, I switched it back to the normal speed. (Yeah, the pretty little Neo is now hidden inside the cab, but it will take trips to hacker and Linux conventions from time to time, as its predecessor did, so its beauty is not completely wasted. 😉 )

That said, which emulators and games would you or anyone else reading this recommend to test overclocking on? I was never much interested in theoretical numbers from benchmarks, but rather in actual noticable effects.

Thanks, and have fun with your new Toys. 😊