Orange Pi 4 Metal Enclosure Launched for $10

Orange Pi 4 and Orange Pi 4B, the latter further adding a Gyrfalcon 2801S AI accelerator chip, were launched in late 2019 for as little as $50 with 4GB RAM making those some of the most affordable Rockchip RK3399 SBC’s on the market.

Since then, Shenzhen Xunlong Software launched some extra accessories for the board including a PCIe expansion board with a mini PCIe socket, and a SIM card slot, and very recently a Rockchip RM310 4G LTE modem to go along. The latest addition is a metal enclosure made of aluminum alloy and suitable for either version of the board.

Orange Pi 4 Metal Enclosure
Click to Enlarge

The enclosure is fairly compact with fins on top for cooling and openings for the 40-pin GPIO header and PCIe connector. Talking about PCIe, it would have been nice if they also make a case capable of taking their PCIe adapter board, but that would be for another time.

Orange Pi 4 Metal Enclosure Thermal Pads
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I’ve seen several metal cases for Raspberry Pi boards, and most of the time, they have extrusions – serving as heatsinks – for the processor and other chip that need cooling, but the company went with another design decision for Orange Pi 4 metal enclosure by using thick thermal pads to cover Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core processor and the 4GB LPDDR4 RAM chip. A clear advantage is that if the processor package changes, a new case does not need to be designed.

Orange Pi 4 Thermal Pads

Orange Pi 4 metal enclosure is now up for sale for $9.49 plus shipping on Aliexpress. If you’d like an external WiFi antenna as shown in the first photo, a kit is offered for $9.99 with extra u.FL to SMA cable and external antenna.

RK3399 SBC Enclosure

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5 Comments
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theguyuk
theguyuk
3 years ago

I do wonder if those thick pads will work? Any chance they would send cnx one to test?

Chris
Chris
3 years ago

If you do so, then you will demonstrate the inneficience of those pad by loading the cpu with 20% of load and add him a 4K video decoding… You will hang in less than 5mn. The friendlyelec board have also a silicon pad, and hang also with the same test.I have had to remove this pad and use a copper shim and completly polish the dissipator and the shim on the contact face. And with this thermal condition, I can confirm that RK3399 can play 4K vidéo and using any load on the main cores with perfect stability, but it’s… Read more »

theguyuk
theguyuk
3 years ago

Good idea!

itchy n scratchy
itchy n scratchy
3 years ago

Cool makes the opi4 even more interesting, but is it true it won’t take any ssd?

Khadas VIM4 SBC