I bought this case to have a built-in fan to cool my pi4. It was previously idling at 70-75C by the CPU temperature monitor panel, and doing several browser tabs and a youtube video would take it to the limit and cause CPU throttling. Now it is idling at 48C, and playing youtube pushes it to 53C.
The fan is reasonably quiet, but in the evening when the kids are in bed you can hear it.
Good things:
-- Cools my pi4 very well. (see above)
-- It provides decent access to gpio header (both from the top and from the side), has access slots for both camera and display cables.
-- clear top and bottom so you can see the board with alternating layers of black for "style"
-- I haven't tried it, but I bet you could combine 2 of these (you'll need to get longer screws) to allow for peripheral boards inside the case. (the benefit of the stacking layers)
Bad things:
-- documentation should have listed the pins to connect to, but it doesn't
-- you can't remove the microSD card without opening the case or using pliers/tweezers. If they had cut a small notch for you to get a finger to the card it might be easier. There is a hole the card can pass through, but you can't get fingers in it to pull the card out. Works fine to insert the memory card, and the clear bottom layer lets you see what you're doing.
-- very easy to get the individual layers misaligned or mixed up. I strongly suggest that if you are taking the case apart for connections or maintenance that you insert a couple of the screws opposite of what they say so they go up from the bottom. This will keep the layers aligned as you make adjustments.
-- The fan wire is easily trapped between layers while you're putting the case together. Takes a little patience to get everything in smoothly.
-- The fan doesn't stop if you simply use the raspbian shutdown menu item. You have to drop power to turn off the fan.
Other:
-- The opening in the case for power and video is "too tall" leaving lots of room for things to get into the case accidentally. I suspect is also leaves "lots" of room for larger connectors. Kind of a good/bad thing.
-- if you have a heat sink on your pi4 (like I did) from the official raspberry pi 4 case without a fan, odds are good it is too tall and will block this case's fan from spinning. Plan to remove that heat sink and use the one included with this case for your cpu -- it is short enough to work.
All in all, I'm quite happy with this case so far. I'll just keep my needle-nose pliers close by to pull the card if I need to rebuild it...
Update: the fan was mostly quiet at 5v, but I wanted quieter so I shifted to the 3.3v supply on pin 1. That is much quieter and only about 5C higher temperatures than with the 5v fan, still plenty cool enough. It went from idling at 50C to 55C, and a full 4-core compile (opencv) peaked at 70C, (it would have overheated and started throttling without the fan). So far so good!
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 2 |
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