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Hands-On Review: GemPro Enclosure for Raspberry Pi

diyodemag.com

23 pointswalterbell12 comments

The Flirc Raspberry Pi 4 case does the same thing - passively cools the RPi 4 well enough to avoid throttling - for something like half the cost.

A reminder for anyone using the RPi 4, the single greatest determinant of how much your board will heat up is... whether or not you're still on the original release firmware. There was an update that was tremendously effective in cooling things off (without damaging performance).

Flirc, Argon Neo, then all the generic billet Aluminium passive cases, all of which are in the ~$20-25 AUD range (whereas this one is almost $50 AUD).

This stinks of blogspam to try sell their new overpriced case.

Not to mention, like you said, with the recent updates that have made incredible progress in dropping the temps, any generic cheap passive case is fine even for quite heavy use. I have multiple Pi's (3s and 4s) running 24/7 and a few doing quite heavy loads (transcoding, etc) all with cheap Aluminium passive cases and have had zero issues since the firmware updates.

How bad were things for you prior to the firmware update that fixed RPi 4 temp?

I tested on those, but not for performance, just for temperature under max CPU load. I remember getting the impression that a Pi 4 working under that kind of load, and throttling pretty constantly, would probably suffer roughly a 15% performance degradation but I didn't test that assumption much.

I had a funny moment during testing of comparing an 8GB and 4GB Pi 4, each with different revisions of the firmware, and wondering how the hell the temperatures could be so different.

Their Wifi testing methodology is useless, other than to say it didn't completely break the Wifi.

A better test would be to see how far you can get from the access point before degradation of bandwidth kicks in with and without the case.

All they managed to test was that however degraded the signal was, it didn't reach "lost packet" level for their unspecified range to access point.

From experience, I've used a heatsink-looking case on a pi 4 which reduced its WiFi range below 30 feet in some orientations, so it would be nice to see a big more rigor here.

Not a RasPi expert but what about an external antenna?

Doesn't have a connector for one.

This is certainly interesting, but I'm suspicious that this is a digital marketing scheme. Are product reviews normally considered spam on here?

Website not loading, here's the product page:

http://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=product/product.detai...

I just got an Argon ONE case for my Pi 4 8GB. It's pretty sweet. It has a 3 speed fan that comes on when it start getting hot. It doesn't run at all when it's idle and even when it is running it's barely noticable.

The coolest thing about it is it moves all the input/outputs to the rear of the case.

> when we heard that there was a passive cooling solution for the Raspberry Pi which would keep the temperatures low enough to prevent thermal throttling at stock speeds, we were a little dubious.

They shouldn't have been. I have the Argon 40 case for an RPi4. I've overclocked the core to 2.0GHz, and with 100% passive cooling, no fan, it does not thermal throttle at all. I've pegged it at 100% CPU use for an hour with no throttling. The chip runs hot, but it's not a top of the line CPU that needs active cooling. A good sized chunk of metal will cool it just fine.

Cache: https://web.archive.org/web/20201011095019/https://diyodemag...

https://desalvoinc.com/ another option if you are looking for a chunk of aluminum that holds a raspberry pi.

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