Rpi2 cooling

Mill a couple blocks of copper or aluminium to sandwich the whole thing.

Hi,

Sure that overclocking will increase RAM Chip temperature. It is placed on rear face to optimize bus speed with the SoC. Makes cooling more harder.

But it will depend the overclocking mod that you will apply (frequency and/or voltage, the second will have a bigger impact on temperature)

Without goal of overclocking (as PI2 matches my needs as is), I currently use heatsink on SoC only and Cooling Case with a noiseless tiny fan (powered by GPIO port).

Regards,

I have built a few desktop intel computers and can say the memory will heat up, but not to the say degree as the CPU/GPU chips. It will get hotter underneath for sure, so leave some room for air to flow.

For my original 256MB RasPi Model B, I went with an open-frame vertical mount:

https://community.element14.com/resized-image/__size/310x232/__key/communityserver-discussions-components-files/91/contentimage_5F00_178537.html

This way I get natural convection cooling on both sides of the board, keeping everything cool with no heat sinks.  You'd have to do the frame differently with a Model B+ or RasPi 2 since they don't have the RCA mounting lug

Your minimalist set-up, will have to come up with one for my Rpi 2's. Thanks for the great idea and pics.

Your response to my question was excellent. Thank you all for taking the time to reply. I will now mod box and cool ram too.

Hi,

It seems also that network chip (usb, ethernet), can heat too.

Give a look on the thermal pic below. Maybe i will plan to use a second heatsink on it.

That is the USB/phys link controller chip.

Clem

@ Clem

It is also the Ethernet controller which uses the USB bus to communicate with the Broadcom SoC.

On the overall subject:

All IC's are designed to run fairly hot. The lowest temperature grade for most ICs is commercial with a maximum die temperature of 70 deg. C (158 deg. F). For

industrial grade ICs it is 85 deg. C (175 deg. F), and for military grade it is 125 deg. C (250 deg. F, OUCH). Note that even the lowest of these temperatures will

feel uncomfortably hot on bare skin. I believe that the Broadcom SoCs are industrial grade, if the software is enabled it will throttle the clock when the die reaches

85 deg. C. If you are overclocking or running it in high ambient temperatures extra cooling is a good idea because it allows the IC package to dissipate the heat of

the die more efficiently. Otherwise it should be fine as is.

Gary Stewart wrote:

 

All IC's are designed to run fairly hot. The lowest temperature grade for most ICs is commercial with a maximum die temperature of 70 deg. C (158 deg. F). For industrial grade ICs it is 85 deg. C (175 deg. F), and for military grade it is 125 deg. C (250 deg. F, OUCH). Note that even the lowest of these temperatures will feel uncomfortably hot on bare skin.

I am a "run it cool" fanatic.

While I realize that the chips can run quite hot safely, high temperature is the enemy of long-term PC board reliability especially if you turn products on and off.  When I got started in this biz, it was mostly through-hole parts or else gull-wing flat packages.  When the board heated up or cooled down, thermal mis-match stresses would be handled by IC package leads.

Modern PC boards have BGAs and QFPs QFNs [*], where contact is made by solder balls [or similar].  If you stress solder, it doesn't bend -- it cracks.  Eventually the cracks cause intermittent problems, followed by total failure.

Of course, you can leave the product turned on all the time, but then your electrolytic capacitors boil away and voltage ripple causes intermittent problems, followed by total failure.

In both cases you need to worry about tin whiskers, thanks to ROHS.

Or you can run everything cool using good thermal design and avoid these worries.

JMO/YMMV

[*] Edit:  I had meant to write QFN (Quad Flat No-leads), not QFP.  As Gary points out below, QFPs are indeed leaded packages and handle thermal stresses nicely.  RasPi uses a QFN for the USB/LAN chip.