Selection of the type of cooling for an overclocked Raspberry Pi 4B minicomputer processor operating at maximum load conditions

Abstract

The Raspberry Pi is a computer platform that is widely used in education, has a very large community and extensive documentation. Therefore, it can be a good and cheap alternative to a traditional computer, a TV streaming device or a console for less demanding games. In the case of observing a lower efficiency of the microcomputer, one of many possibilities of improvement, which this device offers is overclocking the processor. It is associated with a proper selection of parameters (voltage, clocking) and software in order to achieve the highest possible performance of the dedicated Raspbian system. However, increasing the work efficiency causes the temperature rise up to the limit values. Therefore, an appropriate, i.e. effective, kind of cooling should be applied. Taking all these circumstances into account, an experiment was developed in which temperature measurements were taken during the maximum processor load on all cores at the clock setting that enabled reaching the highest performance. During the research three cases were considered: without the use of cooling, with passive cooling and with active cooling. The results showed that only the use of active cooling clearly improves the operating conditions of the device, due to lowering the temperature by about 16°C compared to the situation without cooling or with the use of a passive radiator.