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Comment by grovellogic | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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