seeed

tl;dr: 52Pi and Seeed Studio's water cooling solution for the Raspberry Pi 5 can be fun, and works better than any other solution—but at a steep price, and with a number of annoying quirks.

A few months ago, 52Pi reached out and asked if they could send a new water cooling kit they were working on for the Raspberry Pi 5. At the time, the hope was we could figure out a way to get very high overclock with adequate cooling.

Unfortunately—for reasons I'll explore more soon—the Pi 5 can't overclock beyond 3.0 GHz (it's not physically possible). Some of why is explained in my blog post Overclocking and Underclocking the Raspberry Pi 5.

But water cooling is still fun, and the product is in production now, so I figured I'd still give it a fair shot, and see if I thought it might be worth buying for certain niche use cases.

Since I started testing various PCI Express cards on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, I've been excited to see what new kinds of custom networking devices people would come up with.

Well, after months of delays due to part shortages, both DFRobot and Seeed Studios have come out with their 2-port Gigabit router board designs, and I was happy to receive a sample of each for testing:

The boards are tiny, and even with the Compute Module 4 installed, they are incredibly small—take a look at the entire assembled DFRobot unit, complete with a Raspberry Pi attached:

tl;dr: After the fall 2019 firmware/bootloader update, the Raspberry Pi 4 can run without throttling inside a case—but only just barely. On the other extreme, the ICE Tower by 52Pi lives up to its name.

Three options for keeping the Pi 4 cozy: unmodified Pi 4 case, modded case with fan, and the ICE Tower.

A few months ago, I was excited to work on upgrading some of my Raspberry Pi projects to the Raspberry Pi 4; but I found that for the first time, it was necessary to use a fan to actively cool the Pi if used in a case.

Two recent developments prompted me to re-test the Raspberry Pi 4's thermal properties: