Hacker News Reader

Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Does it still have thermal problems?

Define thermal problems? They get warm, but newer firmware seems to do much better than the first ones.You could just add a fan and not worry about it.

My early version one (4Gb version), was terrible. I had to buy a fan (thank pimoroni) to stop it thermal throttling.

It was quite poor in performance (youtube tearing a lot, usb keyboard issues, freezing occasionally)

I hope when I plug it in again and update it, things will have stabilised a bit.

I also had an early 4 GB model (well, two of them), and parent post is absolutely correct about initial thermal issues — it was running hot and throttling very heavily.

Later firmware releases improved things a lot.

Agree. my 4GB model is at around 50C most of the time with pihole running. I don't have any heatsink/fan attached to it either

So I ought to update it and have another go ?

Let's see, my two updated RPi4 4GBs, no added cooling, both idling:

  $ vcgencmd measure_temp
  temp=47.0'C

  $ vcgencmd measure_temp
  temp=50.0'C

Not amazing, but good enough for me.

I'll give it another go this coming week then!

Cheers!

Everything thermal throttles these days, but the early Pi4 firmware did it particularly poorly.

Bonus tip: if you want a performance boost on an old laptop, open it up and clean out the caked in dust. Extra points for cleaning and upgrading the thermal compound on the CPU

I bought it on release, and use it as a home server. It idles around 46.

Doesn't seem too hot to me. If you want graphs you can check here https://ci0s.xyz/api

I just leave it sitting on a shelf near router. No fans or heatsinks.

What do you use to generate that page? Any standard off-the-shelf software?

I wanted to try my hand at webdev. Its a custom built flask/gunicorn server serving matplotlib generated graphs with bootstrap css.

I use a pi4 4gb as my controller for my ubiquiti device and as a pi-hole. It has the PoE hat with the fan removed and a piece of aluminium tube filled with coins and thermal goo standing on the processor. It is in a hot room (about 32c) and even under stress on all cores I have never seen higher temps than 67c.

The usb chip is hot as F though, even with updated firmware.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com