Recently I had to come up with something costing about 3 € to get the free shipping from Amazon, so I added a Raspberry Pi heat sink set from Az-Delivery to my shopping basket.

I have a Raspberry Pi 3 with Emulationstation to play old console games, which runs NES, SNES, and Playstation games easily, but has serious problems with most of n64 games. To run these games, the Pi would need to be overclocked, which in turn requires some additional cooling hardware. With this in mind for the future, I set to test the cooling power of this simple solution.

Installation

The heat sink set consisted of 2 aluminum pieces, with a 2-sided tape on the bottom. Installing the sinks was easy and straightforward. After installation, the sinks immediately felt warm to the touch, which seemed like a good sign, but more tests were in order.

Before:

After:

And with the case closed, ready for testing, just to show the conditions where the measurements were taken:

 

Temperature Measurements

I had my doubts about the sinks’ cooling efficiency, especially since the tape connecting the sinks seemed to be typical 2-sided acrylic tape – I suspect it’s “3M 9448A Double Coated Tissue Tape”, not exactly a good thermal conduct as such.

The Raspberry Pi core temperatures were measured using the command:

/opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp

Light load:

Running a VPN server, Irc screen, some server daemon processes:

No heat sinks: 59.1 ºC (constant)

With heat sinks: 54.2 ºC (constant)

Heavy load:

After 20 minutes of SNES Super Mario World on Emulationstation on top of the processes from the Light load, measurement were taken about every 1-2 mins:

No heat sinks: 75.2, 74.1, 76.3, 76.8, 77.4; avg.: 76.0 ºC

With heat sinks: 68.8, 69.3, 67.7, 68.2, 66.6; avg.: 68.1 ºC

It’s also worth noting that with the heat sinks installed, the temperatures were much faster to drop from peak values after the CPU load decreased. The room temperature was 20 ºC during the test.

Conclusions

The heat sinks were able to decrease the core temperature of the Raspberry Pi 3 by 8 ºC, on average, under heavy load. I think this was quite an admirable result, taking into account how tiny the heat sinks are, the not-well-conductive tape, and the closed case the Pi was in. With the price of about 3 € and such a simple installation, it’s definitely worth it if you’re worried about your Pi heating up.