If you have been looking at cases for your shiny new Raspberry Pi 4, I am positive you have come across ones that either include heatsinks, a fan, or both. The question is, is that just a needless extra cost, or does it really help?
Well I ended up buying a case that came with both, and decided to test if it was worth running the fan or just keeping it off.
Table of Contents
Methodology
Now as this was my own hardware, I wasn’t about to undo stress onto it. I decided to arbitrarily run the stress tests for two minutes each, which actually turned out to be pretty good to allow the core to heat up and even out.
I would then wait for the temperature to return to idle before attempting another run. This was all run in a 26.5*C room. I followed this guide to run the programs stress and cpuburn.
No Fan, No Heatsinks
| Open air | Enclosed | |
| idle | 52 | 54 |
| stress | 78 | |
| cpuburn |
So by itself, as long as the raspberry pi is in the open air, it seemed to just hang in there for the stress test before hitting the 80*C thermal limit. Which, when hit, the raspberry pi will automatically start throttling the speed of the processor to cool it.
No Fan, Heatsinks
| Open air | Enclosed | |
| idle | 52 | 54 |
| stress | 75 | |
| cpuburn |
We can see that the heatsink helped out minimally when in the open air, but it couldn’t keep up in an enclosed case without moving air.
Fan, No Heatsinks
| Enclosed | |
| idle | 48 |
| stress | 64 |
| cpuburn | 70 |
Now that’s a difference! That tiny little fan really does do more than I expected it too.
Fan and Heatsinks
| Enclosed | |
| idle | 44 |
| stress | 60 |
| cpuburn | 66 |
Well-well-well, looky there. Putting everything together really does make a difference.
Conclusion and Chart
Lets make this a little more digestible with a chart.
It’s pretty obvious that yes, both fans and heatsinks help. However, if you have to chose just one, pick the fan any day.
