$20 ICE Tower CPU Cooling Fan Targets Raspberry Pi 4

The Raspberry Pi 4 is much more powerful than its predecessors, but with great power comes a lot of heat, and it may affect the performance of your board under leaod. We’ve already seen that fitting a heatsink to Raspberry Pi 4 does help, and provided it’s sized appropriately, should help you board work at its full potential in most circumstances.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is also working on improved firmware to lower temperature and power consumption of their latest single board computer, but if you want to make sure your board stays cool at all times: ICE Tower CPU cooling fan will certainly do the trick.

Raspberry Pi 4 Cooling FanIt’s fitted to a Raspberry Pi 3 board in the photo above, but Seeed Studio reports it’s compatible with Raspberry Pi 4, and can reduce the temperature of the Raspberry Pi from 80°C to 40°C.

It’s actually compatible with all recent Raspberry Pi boards as it’s placed on the four RPi mounting holes, and powered by the 5V from the 40-pin GPIO header.

Raspberry Pi 4 Large HeatsinkMost people won’t actually need this, but they may want it, as it looks pretty cool (pun intended), and does not cost that much with Seeed Studio taking pre-orders for $19.90 plus shipping..Delivery is scheduled for July 19.

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55 Comments
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willy
willy
4 years ago

It would have made a funny 1st of April, but at this point it simply underlines how pathetic the thermal management on this device is :-/
I mean, for a board designed to run bare on a desk, to support I/O extensions, or to hang behind a display, there are not that many really usable options in the end considering the amount of cooling required to use it fully.

tkaiser
tkaiser
4 years ago

I’m waiting a few weeks until the first review of the Flirc Raspberry Pi 4 Case will be available. In the past the Flirc cases performed rather poorly compared to other full Aluminium enclosures which most probably was related to a crappy thermal pad supplied.

dgp
dgp
4 years ago

I doubt it really needs a big cooler like this. This seems to be an existing GPU sized radiator block with a CNC’d bracket to make it fit.

Karl
Karl
4 years ago

It doesn’t, I have a cooler on it that’s a bit taller than the pins & covers most of the board but fits in a case. When benchmarking I managed to peak it at 48c

pmos69
pmos69
4 years ago

pic?

Nick Summy
4 years ago

I think that’s exactly what it is, but cpu not gpu. I have something similar on my i7. I’m not a thermal expert but I was also under the impression that these giant heats inks work well because it draws heat in the path of the existing case fan…

tkaiser
tkaiser
4 years ago

BTW: RPi Trading is also selling an enclosure or board + this new enclosure as a kit. Thermal results of this combination are just a disaster and they way to deal with this even more: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=243500&start=100#p1492314

blu
blu
4 years ago

I’m deeply surprised that thermal concerns are considered concerned trolling at those forums..

tkaiser
tkaiser
4 years ago

Everything asides applauding is considered trolling there 🙂

BTW: from the same guy you can also learn over there why not having eMMC on those Raspberries is great: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1484362#p1484362

blu
blu
4 years ago

Ohhh, so he’s the source of that ‘eMMC less reliable than SDs’ gem.. Peaches.

ps: for the record, my original comment was sarcasm.

tkaiser
tkaiser
4 years ago

He clearly confuses raw NAND with eMMC. At another location he claims SD card and eMMC would be totally incompatible and it would require huge software and hardware efforts to bring eMMC to an RPi (while at the same time they have Compute Modules with eMMC already).

All of this is just an illustration what happens when you consider every criticism being ‘trolling’. You start to live in an own small world that’s different from reality.

Jerry
Jerry
4 years ago

While that’s true, not all eMMC boards have builtin soldered eMMC. For example, the Odroid eMMC connector easily becomes loose. It might even be worse than a tight SD card slot. Ideally you’d want to provide soldered eMMC and a SD card slot for those who want removable storage. That’s just impossible to provide on a $25 board.

blu
blu
4 years ago

Ideally, people would try and educate themselves rather than posting nonsense. Alas.

willy
willy
4 years ago

Yeah, sure, like this:
https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=212 ($18 with 4GB/$22 with 8 GB)
or this:
https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Orange-Pi-PC-Plus-ubuntu-linux-and-android-mini-PC-Beyond-Raspberry-Pi-2/1553371_32668618847.html ($24 for 8GB eMMC+1GB RAM + 4 cores)

Ah Jerry, your ability to live happy inside a small cage preventing your from visiting the world is fascinating!

Diego
Diego
4 years ago

Please let us know your source where the rpi4 is available for 25$

Diego
Diego
4 years ago

Is he confusing emmc with nand maybe?

Diego
Diego
4 years ago

What a moron he is…

Jerry
Jerry
4 years ago

Criticizing the board doesn’t really improve the team spirit of the community. If you don’t want high power CPU, there’s RPi 1-3 for you or even the CM. Everyone can’t handle the hottest new gear.

blu
blu
4 years ago

I thought ‘hottest new gear’ was generally a metaphor, not a literal property of the device?

tkaiser
tkaiser
4 years ago

> Criticizing the board doesn’t really improve the team spirit of the community. What? We are talking about an RPi Trading product right? No community involvement whatsoever when designing the product. This is not Olimex or Pine64 where development happens in the open and community feedback results in quick hardware adoptions prior to product launch. > If you don’t want high power CPU Yes, this lame and false excuse can be read over at the RPi forum also all the time. But the RPi 4’s thermal problems are not related to the CPU cores at all. It’s quite the opposite… Read more »

Leo Li
Leo Li
4 years ago

Raspberry Dual Fan from aliexpress just around $5 + shipping.

Jim st
Jim st
4 years ago

The board I have has 2 micro HDMI connections.

dgp
dgp
4 years ago

The rpi foundation is just thinking about those poor children that don’t have heating at home.
This is nothing to do with putting an unsuitable chip on a small board because the people that buy your boards aren’t kids messing around with i2c/spi widgets and gpio…

Harry S Kruschev
Harry S Kruschev
4 years ago

“The rpi foundation is just thinking about those poor children that don’t have heating at home.”

Poor children in the far North (Alaska, Yukon, NWT, Lapland, Siberia etc) or Far South (Tierra del Fuego) but obviously not those poor children in the tropics.

History teaches us that if you cannot stand the heat from the raspberry pi, you must leave the kitchen immediately.

Perhaps in closing one should mention the article by Camillo Addis,
“Smart Air Conditioner with Raspberry Pi— An Adventure”
which involves a Raspberry Pi, a temperature sensor, and an IR remote controlled air conditioning unit.

Antonym
Antonym
4 years ago

But, but, what about Global Warming? Greta will get a fit.

blu
blu
4 years ago

That’s one proper bracket. I’m a brown cow and I approve it ™.

tonny
tonny
4 years ago

I’ll pick odroid-N2 rather than buy this for RPi4 + this cooler.

tkaiser
tkaiser
4 years ago

Well if your use case deals with USB3 peripherals and access to them in parallel, then good luck with ODROID N2: https://forum.khadas.com/t/vims-proposal-vim3-nas-server-variant/4287/2?u=tkaiser

tonny
tonny
4 years ago

Lucky, I’m not using USB3 peripherals. Mainly use these SBC for web server, or low-res (max FHD) kodi box. Have tried RPi 3B (under perform), XU4 (good, but has moving part, the fan), XU4Q (quite hot, ~60 celcius).

theguyuk
theguyuk
4 years ago

The poster on YouTube of a RPI 4 in a fish tank full of mineral oil and a fan, is much cooler.

theguyuk
theguyuk
4 years ago

This a claim on RPI forum that it is faster than a HK O N2 !

Chris
Chris
4 years ago

And a future Watercooled version 🙂 MDR

halherta
halherta
4 years ago

The Raspberry Pi SBC’s are the undisputed industry standard in low cost SBCs. In fact they pretty much created this market segment and made it what it is today. The Raspberry Pi 4 maybe ‘too hot to handle’ figuratively, literally or even metaphysically. It doesn’t matter. It will sell like “hot cakes” for years to come. Two years from now the raspberry Pi 4 will still be selling millions while the RK3399 based SBCs will be relegated to the dustbin of SBC history. The S922 based SBCs will become less popular because in 6 months Amlogic will release the S932… Read more »

dgp
dgp
4 years ago

>Y’all are just jealous of the success of the Raspberry Pi 4 boards.

Oh no I’m so sad one company I don’t own (outright, shares or otherwise) (might) be selling more stuff that some other company I don’t own. Oh noes. Whatever will I do… maybe I can just buy all sorts of different boards because I don’t have some weird quasi-religious boner for this brand or the other.

blu
blu
4 years ago

@halherta I have zero BananPis and a single, freshly-ordered NaonPi M4*, which I acquired only after a thorough research of its thermal performance. I’m rather selective about my SBC as they get pushed to their thermal limits, and most devices out there just don’t make the cut. RPi stopped meeting my criteria back around r3. This is just the EE side, though, sw-wise RPi stopped meeting my criteria by the time raspbian had settled firmly in armv6 land, and Eben elaborated how they saw no point in moving forward. By that time it was clear the one advantage the Foundation… Read more »

theguyuk
theguyuk
4 years ago

Really it is over priced, over hot and buggy!

Kids will stream with these and still have change
https://www.gearbest.com/tv-box/pp_009989912373.html?wid=1433363#goodsDetail

willy
willy
4 years ago

> Y’all are just jealous of the success of the Raspberry Pi 4 boards. Really really fun. Just let us know, you’re still at school and while waiting for your parents to drive you home, you’re playing with your nice new present that they made to you after you had good scores ? Every single day tends to confirm even more that people are not selective to SBC, it’s RPi which is selective to its users. RPi fundation was probably created by aliens wanting to progressively pick the most naive and least relevant individuals to turn them into meat without… Read more »

halherta
halherta
4 years ago

I’ve bought SBCs with all sorts of SOCs; allwinner’s, amlogic, Atmel, Rockchip, TI and many more. I’m experienced enough with Linux to compile a custom kernel on my own, generate a root filesystem and create a custom image from scratch if I want to. I’m currently playing with the MT7688 devices (Onion Omega 2+ and Linkit Smart MT7688) and openWrt as well as Raspberry Pis. So I’m no RPi foundation fanboy. Having said that my experience with SBCs in general has been this: – Setup the Raspberry Pi – Apply it to a particular use case – It works well… Read more »

willy
willy
4 years ago

Regarding software support, I’d say : – some vendors, like HardKernel do provide regular updates and care a lot about having a fairly complete support of their hardware ; – other vendors do indeed provide a kernel once and rely on a generic distro, so in practice you get a good software support for all userland and kernel depends on the vendor ; – a number of such boards are fully (and sometimes better) supported by alternate images like Armbian which also come with an up-to-date kernel Now regarding features and performance, well, given that these broadcom processors seems to… Read more »

dgp
dgp
4 years ago

Your comment might make some sense if it wasn’t for the fact that I can go and pull torvalds/master and compile a kernel were everything (or very close) works for the beaglebones and for a lot of sunxi boards, slap debian armhf on top with debootstrap and have basically everything that the pi offers aside from maybe some hand holding with device tree overlays. We can see from the above links to the rpi forum that their community and support is superficial. If you talk about a very real issue you get accused of concern trolling and told to like… Read more »

Antonym
Antonym
4 years ago

Getting kicked off from a RPI forum is alarmingly easy.

This whole thing is just a regular business for money; the education angle is their mainly to get tax exemption in the UK. Most sales are not at all to schools.

This Pi 4 would have been great IF it would have run at ~ 45 C idle, but it doesn’t at all. The fact that they didn’t even consider a heatsink etc. from the get go show that they have lost the board design plot here.

Garth
Garth
4 years ago

So I either cool the board or put hats on it but can’t do both. This won’t even fit in a Pi box. Worthless. Looks like putting a coo!ing tower on a house.

theguyuk
theguyuk
4 years ago

@CNX

Seems overheating is not the only issue, now cable problems.

https://liliputing.com/2019/07/lilbits-372-raspberry-pi-4-charging-issues-and-usb-c-confusion.html

tkaiser
tkaiser
4 years ago

> cable problems

It’s not ‘cable problems’ but the missing 2nd CC resistor in the USB-C circuitry. Only a new board revision can fix this flaw.

The ‘official position’ on this is scary as usual: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=243875&p=1487155#p1487426 (develop product, do very limited testing, launch the product, be surprised that it doesn’t work as expected, start to buy testing gear after product launch. Same sh*t show as with their crippled GbE implementation on the RPi 3B+ or the PoE HAT)

theguyuk
theguyuk
4 years ago

I cannot see how they did any pre launch testing, people had these 6 months prior to launch, and no one highlight heat issues?

willy
willy
4 years ago

Very likely they don’t care if testers are fanboys… You know, the type of people who reboot the crashed raspi every morning at the office just to pretend it works great even in a professional environment.

halherta
halherta
4 years ago

I don’t see the problem. Just buy a power supply that works with the RPI4. Every SBC has its quirks. If I remember correctly the ODroid-C2 was running at a lower clock speed than advertised for months. All Winner SBCs with SATA connections were running slower than molasses until a very recent update to their drivers.

Let’s not pretend that other SBC’s don’t have such problems. This is basically a nothing burger.

halherta
halherta
4 years ago

The first (and last) nanopi that I purchased several years back had a WiFi chip that would fail intermittently. The fix was to desolder a 0402 resistor and solder another one in its place. That was when I decided to never buy a nanopi ever again. Never had such a problem with my RPIs.

willy
willy
4 years ago

> Every SBC has its quirks This was precisely the point. You mentioned that in your experience RPi had none of the issues of other boards, some of us were saying that RPi has had a lot of problems as well, and recurring ones by the way (power supply, thermal management, memory performance), many of which could have been addressed by a more open design phase. The difference is that most other vendors are much more willing to listen to their customers’ suggestions to improve their designs, and some even adjust the designs after distributing a few beta batches to… Read more »

tkaiser
tkaiser
4 years ago

> For Odroid & Olimex boards, the specs are discussed on the forums

When has this happened with ODROIDs (not talking about fixing stuff like C1 –> C1+)?

halherta
halherta
4 years ago

I agree that It would be nice if the RPI foundation had a more open design phase, but to me it is not a deal breaker. And while the Raspberry Pi SBCs might have their quirks, they rarely exhibit serious hardware faults for false advertising about performance / speed. They almost always have an absolutely reliable and easy to use OS image available for download. It maybe non-optimal due to being 32-bits but it can do everything that I’d want with minimal to zero fuss. I’ve bought many SBCs in my time, the Raspberry PI offered the best user experience.… Read more »

willy
willy
4 years ago

Huh, no. No particular interest in these vendors. I might even have been the first one to report the fake frequency on Amlogice S905. Just sticking to facts and specs for a given price. I’ve built build farms and network servers, and it just turns out that every single time no RPi could be used for the task and that some RPi fanboys asked in circles “but why the hell are you not using a raspi for this, it’s the best board for this task” (which was totally wrong). Right now my network stuff is made from Marvell chips since… Read more »

Antonym
Antonym
4 years ago

If you even mention one of the other SBCs on the PRi forum you get derailed fast to “off topic” by some bullies and next fully blocked to comment.
I came there to see about our school computer lab set up but was not allowed to compare or contrast hard/software. I found out that their education forum was an after though that barely gets traction, because they focus on sales to adult enthusiasts and businesses that build on top of their board.
I discovered where this “Foundation” ( UK Registered Charity 1129409) has its vested interests: $$$$$$$$.

Khadas VIM4 SBC