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Norway, Oslo
1 Level
696 Review
56 Karma

Review on Enhanced Cooling Case for Raspberry Pi 4 Model B – Geekworm Armor Case with Dual Fan, Aluminum Alloy Construction for Effective Passive Cooling by Greg Muin

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Pretty good cooling at the stock clock speed and 2.0 GHz.

Mine arrived on 08/17/2019. After reading Scott Thomas' review, I made sure to check the clearance between the SoC, RAM and USB chips and their respective cooling tabs on the inside of the top case. I dry attached the case cover to my Pi 4 by placing a small ball of plasticine on each chip. After removing the top of the case, each chip had a thin film of Play-Doh on it, with the excess pushing out the edges. I carefully scraped half the film off of each chip and compared the thickness of the remaining half to a piece of 80# cardstock. Play-Doh foil was thinner than cardboard. In other words, the clearance above the chips was less than 0.2mm, which ensures that the included 0.5mm thick thermal foam pads compress more than halfway and work properly. The issue reported in the reviews by Scott Thomas and MarkD appears to have been resolved. I tested the cooling by running cpuburn-a53 for 15 minutes at default 1.5GHz. This program constantly runs all four cores. The SoC temperature monitored by both cpuburn and RPi-Monitor stabilized at 58-59 °C and the room temperature was 27 °C. The RPi monitor shows an idle SoC temperature of 43-44 °C. UPDATE August 24, 2019 Overclocking the SoC to 2.0GHz and overvoltage 1.0441V, and overclocking the GPU to 600MHz, the 15-minute Couburn-a53 benchmark stabilized at 78-80C but never dropped below 2.0GHz. The ambient temperature this time was 25°C. This cooling solution is hardly enough for overclocking when all 4 cores are running at 2.0 GHz.

Pros
  • Acceptable
Cons
  • Modern