Official Raspberry Pi 4 Case Fan and Heatsink Combo Aim to Tame Its Thermal Throttling Potential

Add-on for the official Raspberry Pi Case offers active cooling through a GPIO-controlled PWM fan.

Those looking to get maximum performance out of their Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computers now have an official accessory designed to put an end to thermal throttling: the Raspberry Pi 4 Case Fan.

The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is the most powerful Raspberry Pi ever released, but that power comes at a cost: It generates enough heat to throttle the CPU down from its stock 1.5GHz clock speed under heavy and sustained load. Exactly how long it takes depends on the load and whether the Raspberry Pi is running uncased or in an enclosure — and for the latter third-party fans have long proven necessary for peak performance, particularly while overclocking.

The newly-launched Raspberry Pi 400 solves the problem with a slab of metal acting as a passive heatsink, but those with the smaller Raspberry Pi 4 were left with third-party fixes or the fan built into the optional Power over Ethernet (PoE) HAT — until now.

The new fan, the first official Raspberry Pi cooling product, works with the official case. (📹: Raspberry Pi)

"The $5 Raspberry Pi 4 Case Fan clips inside the lid of the official case, and keeps your Raspberry Pi 4 cool even when running the heaviest workloads, at the most aggressive overclocks," claims Raspberry Pi Foundation co-founder Eben Upton. "Now the board remains well below 70°C, and as expected the compile job takes the same amount of time as on the uncased board."

The fan slots into the existing case design and ties into the Raspberry Pi's general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header for power. A third wire provides pulse-width modulation (PWM) control, allowing the Raspberry Pi to enable and disable the fan according to temperature — though this is, at present, binary on-off, with PWM speed control theoretically possible but up to the buyer to implement. To improve heat transfer between the Raspberry Pi and the air, the kit also includes a small aluminium heatsink which attaches to the BCM2711 system-on-chop.

Full details, and links to purchase the add-on from resellers, can be found on the Raspberry Pi website with testing figures posted to the blog; note, however, that the fan requires the official Raspberry Pi Case, supplied separately.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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