Hacker News Reader

Comment by MaPi_ | Hacker News Reader

> Most N100 are noisier, hotter

I went from a passively cooled RPi5 to a N100. The RPi idled at around 50°C and throttled under load. The N100 keeps 56°C under light load (the heaviest things are rtl_433, grafana, nextcloud). To keep it from throttling in heavy load I zip tied a small Noctua NF-A4x20 to the side of the case over the passive heatsink and adjusted the fan curve to only run at above 60°C. This works super well, the N100 doesn't get hotter than about 62°C under full load and the fan spins slow enough that I can't hear it at all even if I put my ear directly next to it.

View on HN

> To keep it from throttling in heavy load I zip tied a small Noctua NF-A4x20 to the side of the case over the passive heatsink and adjusted the fan curve to only run at above 60°C.

I applaud your creativity but surely this is an indication of the limitations of the architecture!

Nice solution, but with the case I linked, my Pi idles around 37, and reaches 50-ish (both degrees C) at most (if I load it hard), since the case is sucking heat from all chips and bottom of the PCB.

How does it handle electrostatic discharge when touching it in that case? I used a case that was really more of an oversized heatsink[1] than a case and it was really sensitive. Managed to crash the rpi a couple of times when I touched it without touching ground first a couple of times.

edit: I replaced the thermal sticker for thermal paste, not sure if that could have affected it, the paste wasn't the conductive kind.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/GeeekPi-Aluminum-Heatsink-Raspberry-I...

The case I'm using is this [0], and my Pi never crashed while inside it, even though I bear handled it.

The room the Pi lives has a wool carpet, too.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/GeeekPi-Aluminum-Raspberry-Cooling-Th...

> The N100 keeps 56°C under light load

Thats somewhat surprising. I have an old 14nm Celeron I use as a home server and under typical usage it is a few degrees above ambient. Checking now it is 26C. There is no fan, and it just has whatever tiny stock heatsink it came with.

I wonder why N100 is running so hot for you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com