
Active cooling your Raspberry Pi 3 - jonbaer
https://microsoft.github.io/ELL/tutorials/Active-cooling-your-Raspberry-Pi-3/
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gravypod
What's the lifespan of a poorly cooled Raspberry Pi? How do they hold up long
term? Is there any advantage to cooling these things if you're not currently
having problems with your setup thermal throttling?

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olympus
The lifespan is comparable to a cell phone (as in you'll probably break it
mechanically before you burn up the CPU). If you're overclocking it and
running it hard without cooling, I'd expect it to die after a year. I've never
had one break from a cooling problem or any mysterious bricking that might
have been cooling. Even when stress testing, they throttle back on their own,
and are idiot proof as far as heat goes. The thing that will frustrate you far
more is the degraded performance.

And no, if you aren't experiencing throttling, then cooling them isn't giving
you any advantages. Marginally prolonging the life of a $35 computer with a $5
fan isn't cost effective- consider that when you have to buy a new one in a
few years you will be able to buy more performance for the money or get the
same performance for much less. Think about the upgrade from the original Pi
to the Pi3, or the cost drop to the Pi zero.

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omilu
_> >as in you'll probably break it mechanically before you burn up the CPU_

It's solid state, there is nothing mechanical to break. I've had two running
continuously since 2014. Use a ramdisk. No issues.

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highace
I think they mean from when you toss it in a bin full of cables and scraps and
something breaks off.

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olympus
Correct, I meant physically breaking some part of the board as a whole, not
trying to imply that there was a mechanical aspect to the CPU. I've only
broken two Pis. I stepped on one because my cat knocked it on the floor, and
the other I broke because I used mounting screws with too big of a head and
broke off a capacitor and took the copper pads with it.

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b3lvedere
Hmm, this seems more like a specific solution for just this setup.

I've put my Pi 3 in a transparant enclosure and heatsinks on both
chips.(Bought it as a kit)

After a few days i noticed it overheats a little when it's really active.
While i was researching more silent cooling options i noticed that the bottom
part of the enclosure was way hotter than the top part.

I glued four big string beads under the enclosure. It now looks like the
smallest transparant table in the world. Problem solved.

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ersiees
This was mentioned slightly already, but still I would like to ask: Why would
you use a Raspberry PI or Dev Board to run compute intensive AI tasks on it?
Why not use the PC you are working with most of the time, that probably is
much faster? And might even have a reasonable ggpu!?

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mwexler
Things make more sense if you look at the top level page:
[https://microsoft.github.io/ELL/](https://microsoft.github.io/ELL/) talks
about their embeddable ML libraries, with the focus on allowing some live
training on the embeddable, instead of, say, CoreML which (as of this writing)
only allows scoring of trained models on the device.

So, showing how this works on a Pi (and where it doesn't quite due to heat) is
in scope; I don't think they intended to replace a GPU-based PC training
approach.

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SeanDav
> _" heat sink - heat sink on the processor, fan turned off"_

Not a huge criticism, but I am not sure their heatsink test was particularly
efficient as all they did was turn off the fan mounted on the heatsink. It
seems quite likely that the fan was acting as an insulator and at the very
least, impeding heat dissipation.

I may of course be misunderstanding what they actually did.

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Xylakant
if you look at the provided pictures, the fan sits beside the heatsink and not
right on top of it. I don't think it would make a major difference either way,
it's not blocking the heatsinks airflow.

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leowoo91
Mobile phones don't have fan yet they don't have issues with overheating.
Maybe it is the heat that is overrated unless you compute 7/24.

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oliwarner
It's the 40nm process of the BCM2837 SoC in the Raspi3 that _really_ makes it
so [comparatively] hot. That's stone-age lithography there.

Modern phone SoCs are not only etched down at "10nm" (FinFET et al, making
things _seem_ smaller too), they also get to sink their heat into adjacent and
highly conductive components like the screen and battery.

Raspi3 has air on one side, and a [comparatively] thick PCB on the other.
Thermally speaking, they're in different worlds.

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userbinator
_they also get to sink their heat into adjacent and highly conductive
components like the screen and battery._

...and the user's hand. That's a huge amount of thermal mass.

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jamesfmilne
... which is connected to a huge liquid cooling system!

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agumonkey
What about a thermocooling slot ?

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gtm1260
Hah, interesting/fun that Microsoft would release a guide for something so
hacky. There may be some spirit left at that company yet!

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laumars
"hacky" is the right word. This is one of the poorer guides to installing a
Raspberry Pi 3 fan.

The cynic in me also finds it slightly amusing that Microsoft complain about
the Pi constantly overheating when it works just fine for the vast majority of
other users. Heck, even the gaming community (eg RetroPi) often overclock this
thing with little more than a heat sink. I think it just goes to show that
there is still a lot of work required to get Windows down to the same
footprint as Linux.

Still, at least Microsoft are embracing the Raspberry Pi. :)

~~~
omginternets
>The cynic in me also finds it slightly amusing that Microsoft complain about
the Pi constantly overheating

The cynic in me will be monitoring the news to see if MS releases a competitor
(FPGA-based?) to the RPi in the near future.

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amiga-workbench
That wouldn't surprise me. They want to claw some developer mindshare back,
they started with the Linux subsystem for windows, a SBC may be the next step.

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bipson
What kind of annoys me about this post is that there are vast numbers of
reports from people looking exactly at this issue and going further, even
comparing different heatsinks, e.g. [1]. Would have been easy to find.

Oh how great could this world be, if people would do to their research and
stop doing for a hundredth time what others already did. They could start from
there and build upon if they need to. Or fill the gaps. But nope, let's do it
all over again and learn even less if possible.

[1] [https://github.com/superjamie/lazyweb/wiki/Raspberry-Pi-
Cool...](https://github.com/superjamie/lazyweb/wiki/Raspberry-Pi-Cooling)

