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hot case

Christoph Lingg

January 24, 2020 14:41

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I just joined the raspberry pi community some days ago and I bought the amp2 bundle with an raspberry pi 4 (2GB) with a plastic case as suggested in the shop (https://www.hifiberry.com/shop/bundles/hifiberry-amp2-bundle-4/). Everything works fine but I am surprised how warm this setup gets even when idle (I use volumio on it). At room temperature the CPU shows 83 °C. I expected the raspberry to have a small energy footprint and I wonder if it would be better to use a raspberry 3 or even smaller instead of version 4. Or is temperature rather related to amp2?

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3 comments

• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team January 24, 2020 15:09

  Hi,
  
  It depends a bit on what you run on the Pi. With our own HiFiBerryOS that doesn't do any heavy processing we usually lower CPU temperatures (in the 60s to 70s). However, the CPU temperature doesn't say anything about the temperature in the case which is lower.
  
  In general the Pi 4 runs a lot hotter than the Pi3, but you shouldn't be worried about it. The Pi's CPU is designed to work at this temperatures and will automatically throttle if it gets too hot (that's something that every notebook also does today). 
  
  There will be a steel case for the Amp2 in the near future that will allow better heat dissipation. But in general the universal case is still fine and we're running it here in the office every day.
  
  Best regards,
  Daniel

• 0
  
  Christoph Lingg January 24, 2020 22:04

  Hi Daniel,

  thanks for your quick response!
  
  > In general the Pi 4 runs a lot hotter than the Pi3, but you shouldn't be worried about it. The Pi's CPU is designed to work at this temperatures and will automatically throttle if it gets too hot (that's something that every notebook also does today). 
  
  I am not so worried about the heat destroying the CPU but as cpu temperature is constantly above 80°C (even when idle) the use of a Pi4 seems odd. You never get the full power of this device.

  As I read more about this topic I realised this is a general problem of the 4th generation. Using it with a case without additional cooling will always result in high temperatures: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=243500

  I wonder if it would make more sense to sell the AMP2 together with Pi3 instead of Pi4?
  
  Once the steel case is in the shop I will check it out!
  
  Best,
  Christoph

• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team January 25, 2020 06:14

  The Pi 3B+ is practically not available at all anywhere since months and selling the Pi3B doesn't make sense from our point of view as it has a flawed BT design that creates problems with audio transmissions (as is is missing hardware handshake).
  Feel free to get a Pi3 somewhere else. We don't say you should not use it, but right now, our recommendation based on features and availability is clearly the Pi4. 
  As I wrote before: The high temperatures are not a problem. There is no need for "the full power", but "the right power". Does it do the job? In our opinion is clearly does and we run it without fans here - even if the CPU runs a bit hotter.
  People often have the feeling that a high temperature of the CPU  is  a bad thing. It isn't. A higher temperature results in better heat dissipation and that's fine as long as the temperature is within specification. Also throttling isn't a problem at all. The Pi's CPU design isn't as sophisticated as the design of modern CPUs, but you will see the same behavior basically with every high-powered laptop today. That's thermal management and it's totally common in today's CPU architectures.
  
  Best regards,
  Daniel

  Edited by HiFiBerry team January 25, 2020 10:42