Awesome work, and I'm glad you could post some results! I'm hoping to get time to delid one, put on a peltier cooler, and try to control the temperature a little better for a run to see how high it'll go before either burning up or going unstable.<p>From my testing on clocks on the Pi 5, it looks like the default clock of 2.4 GHz is pretty close to the sweet spot for this chip (BCM2712), and you burn a lot of power for small incremental gains after that[1]. (Which you seem to also show with the 3.3 GHz overclock!).<p>I also spoke to one of the Pi engineers about the chip behavior at higher clocks, and he suggested unlike some chips, this chip might run more stably at higher temperatures (like 50-60°C) rather than 'as cold as you can get it'. So that poses some challenges since most cooling solutions aren't tuned for 'keep a temperature' but instead 'get it as cold as possible', without a lot of manual tweaking.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/overclocking-and-underclocking-raspberry-pi-5" rel="nofollow">https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/overclocking-and-unde...</a>
Is there a consensus on the best available cooler for the Pi 5? I looked at this exact unit but wanted more of a "case" design.<p>I first tried the Flirc passive case. It seems to transport and dissipate heat notably better than active coolers with copper heatsinks and 4000 RPM fans. That's especially impressive given that the entire top and bottom are plastic, leaving the horizontal edge as the only surface for heat dissipation.<p>My remaining concern there is that it only cools the Broadcom SoC, while creating a nice little insulated oven for the other chips. The inner surface area is much greater than the outer surface area, and with no ventilation by design, so heat from the SoC is being distributed throughout the whole inner volume.<p>I also tried an active cooler to avoid that, which I'm sure is better for every other chip but I'm surprised to find was substantially worse for the SoC itself. I guess the tiny copper block gets saturated very quickly and its surface area isn't very large for air cooling.<p>Maybe that's why the monoblock passive coolers do so well, in theory they combine the best of these approaches. I just wish they'd apply the same idea to a refined "case" design like the Flirc.
pi's feel like the perfect candidate for submerged liquid cooling. imagining a tiny little french fry basket filled with pi's being lowered into some mineral oil and bubblin. salt to taste.
> I don't want people blaming me if their Pi decides to halt and catch fire.<p>For those who didn't catch the reference:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing...</a>
> A single mov.cc instruction can be patched to remove the voltage limit. However, it's in bootmain, which is signed, so we can't just patch bootmain and flash the eeprom.
>
> However, as a root linux user on Raspberry Pi full access to system memory, including memory used by the videocore. I mmap'd /dev/vc-mem, searched for the instruction and replaced it, but i'll leave that as an exercise to the reader. I don't want people blaming me if their Pi decides to halt and catch fire.<p>Does this need to be reapplied every time at boot? Guessing yes...
> There's a silicon lottery<p>Isn't there also an environmental factor that hasn't been fully explore? Are we sure there isn't an alternative to the cooling mechanism on the CPU than the two options the parent and Jeff used?
Semi-related, but TIL the Raspberry Pi Foundation enabling large corporate customers to secure-boot lock the Pis they're embedding in their juice dispensers and whatnot.<p>Nothing like being a supposed open source darling and helping corporations deny people the right to use hardware they purchase, the way they want to - and helping contribute to e-waste, because there will be millions of Pis that nobody can use for anything other than the IoT banana dispenser they were integrated into...
Assuming a fast reliable internet connection, how well does an overclocked raspberry pi 5 perform when video conferencing using popular conferencing applications such as zoom, google meet, ms teams and the like?