Extreme Raspberry Pi Cooling with All Fans Enclosure!

Keeping your Raspberry Pi single-board computer cool has always been essential to proper performance, but given how difficult they are to source these days, thermally coddling your Pi is perhaps even more en vogue. Normally, cooling means using a heat sink and a single fan, or a more advanced device like an Ice Tower cooler. Michael Kelments, however, decided to take things to the extreme by creating a Raspberry Pi enclosure made (almost) entirely out of fans.

Yes, Kelments’ extreme cooling system features 24 fans arranged in a laser-cut frame, with of six on the longer sides and top, two on the shorter side with ports, and four opposite of that. This arrangement gives it enough room for an Ice Tower, along with the Pi, and opposing fans are set up to blow and suck air in order to eliminate dead zones.

While each fan runs at 5V and just .1 amp each, when linked together that adds up to a whopping 2.4 amps, or 12 watts – just for cooling. Klements actually had to use another external power supply just to accommodate the fans, and he carefully separated out the inputs so that all the current doesn't run through one jumper.

It’s quite an entailing build, especially when the lights are aligned temporarily at powerup. Actual cooling results were somewhat less impressive, tested at a standard 1.5GHz, and overclocked at 2.2 GHz. A simple heat sink and fan settled at an overclocked temperature of 75ºC, an Ice Tower and fan was 49ºC, and an Ice Tower and 24 fans was 44ºC.

Given the massive power usage–over 2000% the rate of a normal fan setup–and the rather modest improvement, Klements sees his case as a bit of overkill, especially given that normal Pi systems aren’t running full out all the time. Of course, if you did want an easy way to switch your cooling fan on and off based on the Pi’s temperature, may I humbly suggest my EZ Fan 2 controller board, available on Tindie, to keep air moving appropriately!

[h/t: Adafruit]