Is that fancy new PI 4 running a little hot? There is a known issue relating to the new USB 3 ports that should be getting some updates to help address it. Perhaps you want to overclock it into something akin to a sleeper hot rod? Maybe you want to add some RGB bling to the experience? Well in any case this might be for you. Credit to OC3D for giving some wider publicity for this nifty thing and then to ETAPrime over at YouTube for making some awesome tutorial videos.
I admit I’m on the fence with this one since one of the purposes for Raspberry PI is in being a pocket PC. This does defeat that purpose but in doing so lowers temperatures by roughly 40c and that is nothing to dismiss. It also opens the door to overclocking the PI 4 by 500MHZ getting you to 2GHZ which can really make a performance difference. The $19.90 Blink Blink Ice tower from Seeed Studio keeps this slice of PI cool in the 33c-41c range with these settings. ETAPrime has a great OC tutorial for this as well. Use at your own risk! Lots of fun to be had but no one enjoys burning up their toys. Been there and done that when I was a kid.
From 3d printers, to robotics, to education, the Raspberry PI never ceases to amaze me. Now we have miniaturized cooling solutions to allow it to reach new heights(pun intended). In their tutorial, ETAPrime, even shows it with improved YT video playback as well as some impressive Quake 3 numbers. A user in that forum suggested some people get together for a Quake 3 LAN party. Sysbench Max Prime reported going from 2.4403s to 1.8082s multi core and then 9.4130s to 7.0569s single core. Pretty impressive performance gains for sure.
After watching those videos I felt more excitement in doing a Linux project with one of these than anything desktop PC related. Sure the fan removes the whole pocket pc concept but you still end up with something that is only about the size of a power brick. Tell us your thoughts or perhaps you have experiences with one already.