How are you cooling your Pi 3?

Ekstreme

I put 2 small copper heat sinks in my pi3 today. Total waste of time. I have to run the thing with the case cover off or it starts to throttle

obsidianspider

@Ekstreme How small? Were they finned, or just slabs of copper?

Ekstreme

Finned. but not tall enough I reckon.
I've just ordered a case with a fan. Enough of this mucking about

T1nmaN

I bought this from Ebay.
Huge difference for only $7US

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caver01

@T1nmaN wow. The price is right. Seems like a no-brainer to get a case, heat sinks and a fan for that price. I like that the case was designed with GPIO, camera and display cable slots too. Is it acrylic? It would be easy enough to use acrylic weld solvent to attach "wings" with screw holes for mounting. Seems like a good solution if the fan doesn't conk out.

T1nmaN

@caver01 Yeah, the one thing that is missing is screws and nuts to attach the board to the case, but it's a pretty tight fit, and I feel pretty good about it the way it is. Does anyone know what size nuts and screws would work? I can't remember if it had the holes to attach to the board at the bottom, but I'll check when I get home. It is acrylic.

Here's the ebay link : http://www.ebay.ca/itm/111965982816?_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649&var=410906661440&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

drake999

I personally think some of the cooling methods some people use are a little extreme. If you overclock, heat sinks applied with arctic silver thermal adhesive will suffice. That's what I do. I don't trust the adhesive pads that the heatsinks usually have pre-applied so I peel them off and use a quality thermal adhesive. The downside to using thermal adhesive is you will never get the heatsinks off again, so make sure you apply them correctly. For a $35 dollar board, its a risk I'm willing to take.

flop

I´m using copper heatsink and aluminium alloy case, but I putted the fan above the micro (needed to do Dremel art hehe); with the fan off I get 45-60ºC compared to my old SNES acrilic case 65-75ºC.

I need to automate the fan with some code and see what ºC it takes (working on code!)

PokeEngineer

@obsidianspider

My Pi 3 only gets really hot when installing a lot of things for a long time...

Opening the lid on my case and having heatsinks on the CPU and the built-in USB hub helps, but not that much...

PokeEngineer

@obsidianspider

Sometimes I have to bring out my fan!

Relik

I got bored when trying to overclock mine after first getting it, and this happened... lol. Two 120mm desktop fans wired to an ac adapter power source. Enclosed with some plastic and Pi 3 is suspended in middle with four metal "hooks" from those little suction cup things and rubber bands. :P

Yeah, it's ridiculous. And it sounds like a jet taking off. But I think it's pretty awesome. >_>

backstander

@Relik
lol that is pretty awesome!

Last night I played Strider 2 for the PSX for about an hour then I loaded up Kodi to watch a movie and I got the red box on the top left of my screen so I just popped off the cover on my case and turned on my USB fan and the red box went away in just a few seconds. I don't have any overclock settings right now but I do have heat sinks on both the GPU and CPU. I put my finger to the tops of the heat sinks and they both felt very hot. At this point I rarely use my USB fan but I'm glad I have it for heat emergencies like these.

Relik

@backstander

Yeah, I haven't messed with this one in some time but I couldn't get it to overclock past 1350 and remain stable; even with the monster desktop fans. :)

I need to update the thing actually; I haven't used it since I got it. I need to check out some of the new features of RetPie etc.

I have to say, it was pretty fun making this thing though lol. It actually dropped the degrees during tests by around 15-20 degrees Celsius I believe (under full load). You should have seen the first incarnation of it... I had it mounted with the bottom case attached to two curtain rod wall mounts (parts that hold the rod and attach to wall) that I'd bent straight ... it was hideous. lol

Ahh well, all in good fun.

vbs

@drake999 said in How are you cooling your Pi 3?:

I personally think some of the cooling methods some people use are a little extreme. If you overclock, heat sinks applied with arctic silver thermal adhesive will suffice. That's what I do.

I am a newbie with RPi but I noticed that my RPi3 (not overclocked, just heatsink) throttled down the core when running some CPU benchmarks. At least thats what I concluded when Phoronix suite ran the CPU tests 3 times and the 2nd and 3rd run were always a lot slower than the first run.
So if that is true then I think it makes some sense to apply some proper cooling.

felixrising

Hi!

I bought some 28x28x15 alu heatsink off ebay (no affiliation). Applied some small thermal paste and it fits inside a couple of my Raspberry Pi 3 cases perfectly! (my Multicomp Case and a Pi-Blox Lego® Compatible Case) I'm able to overclock to 1.40GHz without exceeding 80 degrees under load and no active cooling, therefore not being throttled back down to 600MHz.

More photos here: https://goo.gl/photos/rmwd9qdUH65ZjNZD8

NB: the spring only serves to secure the heatsink when the case is closed.

Quackwalks

Could someone tell me how much I screwed up? I used arctic silver epoxy and put a heatsink on the bottom. I saw one photo of a Pi 3b like that and decided I should do that too. -_-

caver01

@Quackwalks Getting some extra cooling on that bottom chip can't hurt. The problems you might have could be fitting it into standard cases or interference with radio signaling (Bluetooth, WiFi)--but try it. It might be fine.

It won't help cool the CPU. You'll need to add another.

Quackwalks

@caver01 thanks for the reassurance. Don't worry, I have two more heatsinks and my case allows for the one on the bottom.

drake999

I'd like to find a case that supports a fan and heatsinks. I have a very slight overclock on my Pi3. The idea was to bring memory and GPU performance up to the same level as the supported overclock of the Pi2. Below are my overclock settings which have proven to be stable except for gradually building thermal issues.

arm_freq=1200
core_freq=500
v3d_freq=500
sdram_freq=500
over_voltage=2
dtoverlay=sdhost,overclock_50=100
temp_limit=80

I didn't use gpu_freq because for what I'm doing there is no need to overclock the video decoder or camera block and I figured leaving them at their stock clockspeeds would help prevent heat buildup, and it seems to have done just that to a point, but I'm still having trouble dissipating heat. After about 1 to 2 hours of use depending on the emulator, the temperature will start to approach 80 degrees and the yellow warning indicator will begin to appear. I'm hoping to find a case that will support heat sinks as well as a small fan and allow access to the SD card. Does anyone have any suggestions for a case? My heatsinks are applied with thermal adhesive and I would rather not purchase a new Pi3 just for a fan. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

drake999

You may notice I have an earlier post stating that heatsinks will suffice if you overclock. At that time I was working on a Pi2, which is the case with that model. Hopefully I didn't mislead anyone.