Poor man's heatsink setup - from 48°C to 35°C (118°F to 95°F)

[DukeJustice]

Hi everyone.

Just got my Pine64+ 2GB and am amazed! I installed zoneminder and the temperature felt hot. At least to me.

I was thinking of installing a heatsink without having to do some major remodelling of the case and all. Usually, I am a pretty "recycle and DIY" type of guy so I had a bunch of motherboard heatsinks laying around:


Here is a little info on the system standard load.


Here is my system's temperature under standard load:


And here it is after my poor man's heatsink setup:


If anyone wants to do as I did, here are a few pictures:





I now imagine someone will ask about system temperature under full load... Here it is:


Putting an old processor fan nearby gives me another 3 to 4°C drop.

Interesting for a poor man's setup.

Your opinion?

Regards.

Marc.

[pelgrim]

I'm interested, I have a few pc's laying around from the dinosaur age that I can cannibalize.

What kind of paste are you using to glue the heat sink, and where can I find that ?

[DukeJustice]

What kind of paste are you using to glue the heat sink, and where can I find that ?

It's simple thermal paste found in computer stores for CPU. It's not a glue but a paste. The heatsink has to be fastened in some way.

Don't forget to put a spacer between the processor and the heatsink. Or the heatsink has to be small because there are some things on the board that are thicker then the processor. So a spacer is needed to steer clear of those.

Keep me posted. Take some pictures and post back here. I'll be more then interested to follow up on your experience.

[MarkHaysHarris777]

Thanks ! There are a few of us experimenting with building heatsinks from copper pennys, real copper pennys before 1982. When I get mine done, I'll post a pic for you...

[Beta_Ravener]

Hi,

I have the board for little longer and didn't have temperature problems so far doing only basic stuff (the highest I got was during some compilation), but your post inspired me to give my board a heat-sink today.

I looked around and found a little heat-sink that was precisely 1.5cm wide, just like the CPU. I cut it in the length so I would have 1.5x1.5cm base that perfectly fits the chip. Then I used a thermal pad instead of paste to keep things clean. It's true that the thermal properties are little worse but not much, and the pad is a little bit sticky so it helps to keep things in place. It looks like this:



With everything in place I ran the stress utility and the temperature started to rise from base temperature of 40C to 50C and then slowly (1 degree each 10 seconds) up to 70C where it settled down. Clearly, the heat-sink itself doesn't have enough cooling capacity to radiate all the heat away, but this was somewhat expected with such a small form. However, I'm impressed with the thermal pad which seems to nicely conduct the heat from the CPU (I didn't measure heat-sink temperature but it got pretty hot. Maybe next time I'll try to measure it.)

When the temperature rise stalled, I tried using fan (the big one for room use because I didn't have anything else to test with at hand) from fair distance of ~50cm at low speed, which created a light breeze. The temperature dropped to 50C in half a minute and continued to drop slowly. If I ever had problems with temperature again, I would probably mount a small 5V fan and let it run if the temp gets too high.


After killing the stress utility, the temperature immediately drops from 70C to 60C and after 5 seconds is at 50C. Just as a final note, the heat-sink is really good thing to have. I first tried the stress utility without it just for reference and the temperature quickly rose up to 80C where the board shut down.

[DukeJustice]

I'm interested, I have a few pc's laying around from the dinosaur age that I can cannibalize.

I call them computozorus.

This is not funny, my first real PC was a 8086 with 640K RAM and a 10 meg RLL hard drive. Cost in excess of 6000$ at the time. And I was listening in on Bill Gate$ when he said no one will ever need more then 640K RAM.

[pelgrim]

I'm slightly younger, and only bought a pc when I was nearing the end of my school career.
386 was my first one.

Back to the heat sink: I thought wrong that the paste would hold the heat sink in place.
This seems to be not the case.
How do you fix the heat sink on the pine pcb ?

[MarkHaysHarris777]

Back to the heat sink: I thought wrong that the paste would hold the heat sink in place.
This seems to be not the case.
How do you fix the heat sink on the pine pcb ?

The correct procedure is to use 3M thermal tape. The 3M tape (designed by 3M for the purpose) does dual duty... it is a thermal conductor, as well it is an adhesive. You can purchase the tape on-line. You place the tape on the heatsink (overlap just a bit) and then you place the heatsink on the chip (get it where you want it once, they tapes are hard to remove)

[Wolfenstein]

I got heat sinks specifically made for microcomputers from my local computer store as seen in this picture http://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=723&pid=17769#pid17769 they came with double-coated adhesive tape.

[MarkHaysHarris777]

I got heat sinks specifically made for microcomputers from my local computer store as seen in this picture http://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=723&pid=17769#pid17769 they came with double-coated adhesive tape.

Most of these (above) are good, and many of them use the 3M tapes, but some do not use the tapes by 3M and they are less effective. If your heatsink seems less effective, try using the thermal tapes by 3M.