HATs and other add-ons • Re: A case for rethinking Pi5 cooling

Hello,
I'm glad I could find this thread.
I bought a PI5/8Gb + active cooler 9 months ago that ran fine.
But adding a NVME board (pimoroni) caused things go bad. And even worse.
A few weeks ago, I found it would not recognize any SD card anymore though detecting them.
And the board itself was very hot. Not only the heatsink, but the USB and LAN plugs, as well as the NVME board.
The app I'm using for astrophoto displayed temperatures up to 68°C where it was only 51°C before.
I thought that encasing it would help, but it was the opposite. The case itself was very hot, and the reported temperature increased up to 79°C in spite of the fan running fast.
I think that damaged the PI, because with no accessory, no SD card, no extra board, etc. on idle state, it is really extremely hot - at the point I almost can't touch it.
I bought another one, in the same conditions it is not hot at all.
I tried to encase it, and found it warmed - up to 62~64°C - so I removed the case. It's currently running, and it's temp is ~52°C.
I think ATM there is no case capable of cooling this setup correctly. All of them, whatever they are, are not suitable for such a setup.
The only way to cool down an encased PI + (pimoroni ?) NVME board would be to add a fan (or maybe two) at the bottom of it, in such a way that it extracts the air from within the case. Any other solution would be totally inefficient IMO.
Just a question - I intend to give it a try, but... - would it be sensible to attach a heatsink under the pimoroni board with some thermal pad ?

Statistics: Posted by ejolson — Sun Sep 29, 2024 8:03 pm