Slides from last night’s talk:
It’s impossible to have a Raspberry Pi Zero overheat unless you overclock it. That’s why you don’t get any cases for it with fans or heat sinks. The quad-core Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, though, has the potential to do so. Here are some numbers:
- Used official case with lid fitted: increases SoC temperature +3 °C over free air
- Test – CPUBurn: https://github.com/pmylund/cpuburn
- Tested 4, 3 and 2 cores burning in 32-bit and 64-bit modes: time from idle to throttling (80 °C) measured
- GPU overheat not tested.
![line graph of cpu temperature against time. Temperature rises sharply from about 47 degrees C to 82 degrees C in around four minutes](https://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cpuburn-4cores-64case-1024x722.png)
![line graph of cpu temperature against time. Temperature rises sharply from about 47 degrees C to 82 degrees C in just over four minutes](https://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cpuburn-4cores-32case-1024x722.png)
![line graph of cpu temperature against time. Temperature rises moderately from about 47 degrees C to 81 degrees C in around seven minutes](https://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cpuburn-3cores-64case-1024x722.png)
![line graph of cpu temperature against time. Temperature rises slowly from about 47 degrees C to 81 degrees C in around ten minutes](https://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cpuburn-3cores-32case-1024x722.png)
![line graph of cpu temperature against time. Temperature rises very slowly, reach 70 degrees C in 40 minutes and then only rising very slightly to about 73 degrees C in the entire run time of 3 hours 20 minutes](https://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cpuburn-2cores-32case-1024x722.png)
Unless you’re doing things that might indicate you should be using a bigger computer, a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W won’t overheat and doesn’t need any form of cooling. If you’re overclocking, well … it’s your choice to have cooling equipment worth more than the computer it’s trying to cool.
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