Heat sinks and active cooling

Hardware
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Although I will be mostly using my OWL units in early to mid spring, it can get rather hot here in the SE United States (~90°F). I initially started putting heat sinks on the R Pi 5s however at around $10 a unit, active cooling with an aluminum heat sink seems to be a no brainer Amazon.com: for Raspberry Pi 5 Official Raspberry Pi 5 Active Cooler, Pi5 Active Cooler Combines Temperature-Controlled Blower Fan and Aluminium Heatsink, Comes with Thermal Tapes for Better Heat Dissipation : Electronics.

I am utilizing the 3D printed enclosures, and while I know there is no air exchange between the enclosures and the outside I feel like I could still benefit from active cooling.

Does anyone have any input on this?

2

Would absolutely go with the active cooler for the Pi 5. I was running these at below freezing here in Denmark and without any cooling they were still overheating inside the plastic enclosure.

With the active cooler they were operating great and the plastic does warm up considerably. I would recommend making sure the fan kicks in earlier - the wireless display lets you toggle the fan on/off auto.

I did some testing with this and it running a YOLO model on CPU with/without fan and overclocked.

This is with the fan running full, stabilised about 67C - otherwise it overheated at 85C and shutdown.

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The only potential issue that @pvouzis identified with the fan is that you now have a moving part in a high vibration area - so there is some failure risk here. We haven’t any issues yet, but it seems a matter of time x scale for it to happen. Hence the interest in the new design for passive cooling through the alu case.

1 Like
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I am definitely excited about version 3!

Thanks for the info, I will set my fan accordingly.