Gadget – 52PI New Ice Tower Cooler for Raspberry Pi 4

Date:  September 22, 2019

This is my new toy.  Raspberry Pi 4 +52PI designed New Ice Tower Cooler.  It is basically a heat sink with a huge fan.  It is very cool.

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Why do I need this cooler?

Raspberry came out with the Raspberry Pi 4 recently.  It comes with fastest processor with 1G, 2G or 4G Ram.  I bought the 4G Ram version.  And it is very fast.  So, I run Minecraft, Office, Web Browser, Drawing program, Simulations program, etc etc… and guess what the temperature can actually go up very very high.  Above 65 degrees C.

That is pretty hot.

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Take a look for yourself.  I wrote a simple python scripts to monitor the temperature.  The temperature of the CPU is stored under this location on Raspberry Pi.

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So, you take a look at the temperature.  Very high.  So, Jay tried to put a fan to cool down the CPU.  But the fan is not good, not cool enough to cool down the temperature.

So, in order to solve this high temperature problem, I did some research and found that this Cooler is the most effective heat sink for Raspberry Pi 4.  Let’s try it out and see.

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Let’s take a look.

This is the fan part.

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You see that copper colour tube… That is the part that you touch the CPU.  So the CPU heat will be passing thru this copper tube and pass down to the many many heat sink layers.  I also don’t know what you call those layer thingy.

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It looks very well designed.

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Here is the video to see the whole thing.

Of course, I am lazy.  So, I outsourced the assembly to my son, Jay.  I interrupted his math homework, and ask him to do.

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This is the user manual.

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The description.  The color LED is really cool.

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Although it is a bit big.  But it is nice looking.  Like those gaming machine.

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It is easy to assembly.  Just follow.

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Exactly the same as the manual.

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So, Jay Jay just followed.  But he can do it very fast.  Later I shared some video.

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Lastly, attached the power.

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His hand is small, so easy to handle the very small screws.

Seems easy for him.

The final transparent plate.

Very pretty little beast.

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I love the color LED.

And instead of 65 degree C, now is constantly below 40 degree C.

That is a huge 20 degrees different.

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 This is the first look after assembly.

If you want to lower down the temperature of the CPU, I think this heat sink fan cooler is the best. However, that means, you can no longer use any of your favourite RPI cases. It has to look like this, bare naked. But the Color LED looks really nice.

Check out the Color LED. Looks quite nice right?

Here are some more nice photos of the colourful heat sink.

Here are the side with fan. Also powered by colourful LED.

Here is the front look of the fan. I tried to take a slow mo on the fan, but the fan spin so fast that even a slow mo also does not work.

Here is my monitor, keyboard, and mouse beside the Raspberry Pi 4 with the Super cooler fan. Looks so small.

When the CPU is cool, the applications is said to run faster. Now the old Raspberry Pi3 is a crap when it come to use it as a desktop PC. The old Raspberry Pi3 is good in doing GPIO programming, prototyping and of course, running RetroPie to play thousands of NES, SNES, GB, GBC, GBA, etc retro games.

But I have tested the new Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB memory. And it runs very fast. As shown in the video, you can run almost any applications. But you need to figure out how to cool down the CPU. So, I cannot wait for Ubuntu or others to update their OS to fit into Raspberry Pi 4. At the moment, only Rasbian are usable on Raspberry Pi 4. It takes some time for the software programmers to catch given that this Raspberry Pi 4 came in and surprise everyone with its existence.

Just imagine, if Raspberry Pie Zero can run RetroPie comfortably, what can Raspberry Pi do when RetroPie update their software to run on it. May be can play Xbox, PS3/4 games? Who knows?

Jay Jay has been very interested in electronics. I even bought him all the circuits parts from Shopee for him to fix his Joycon (Nintendo Switch controller)… he has fixed the 4th and 5th one. So, now we only have 2 spoiled.

I think he has shaped himself into Computer, PC or electronic engineering stream slowly…

Thanks Jay Jay for helping me to assembly this. Thanks.

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