Heat-sink as add-on?

[rahlquist]

I was thinking about getting separate thermal adhesive for all the heatsinks, but i'm not sure i want to commit to having them "permanently" on the board.  It may be the only way to keep them on for a long time though.

I actually just had an idea that may work, will get my daughter to help me document it later tonight. She can do the image work. The only problem may be getting all the parts together to prototype. Will see.

[rahlquist]

Ok didnt wait for daughter so you get my ugly drawings. I was thinking a spring steel wire bail type hold down setup. An example of a simple one can be found https://goo.gl/3rRwvH  I dont want to point to any one site and give them a hug of death. But you get an idea, the wire is formed in such a way that when attached on either end the bends in the center apply pressure on heatsinks placed on the chips. This would likely be a 2 man job to install but would allow for regular heatsink compund to be used for best thermal transfer. 


http://imgur.com/a/x1m0x  Orange lines would be copper heat sinks and the blue lines the steel spring wire. 

I show two angles, above and an elevation so you can envision how the wire would be bent. 

Amazon sells spring tempered wire. Something in this size may be enough tension to hold the heatsinks on http://www.amazon.com/Spring-Temper-Spec...32JBT0J1NZ

I may give this a shot, of course for the 2Gb board like mine we would need one for the bottom as well.

[pine.tree]

The only issue there might be with that retention idea is the conductive wire- it could easily be PlastiDipped or something though.

[rahlquist]

The only issue there might be with that retention idea is the conductive wire- it could easily be PlastiDipped or something though.

Yep fair enough point. That is why I passed it to the screw holes as well though, keeps the whole wire at the same ground potential. I would make the assumption that the IC's are not conductive case. For precaution though after bending plastidip or magnetic lacquer finish could be applied. I might just give this a shot.

[pine.tree]

If you do, definitely let me know how it goes. Very interested in the cooling of the Pines...

I got mine today, I'll be seeing how everything goes once I get it up and running RemixOS, then putting heatsinks and fans on it.

[Andrew2]

Amazon sells spring tempered wire.

Well, I don't want to discourage you putting as much heatsinks as possible on the board if you have fun with that.

But for everyone else who might get the impression something like that would be needed: It isn't. The components we deal here with are made for tablets (small enclosures, no airflow, never heatsinks on DRAM, PHY or PMU). There's no evidence that cooling DRAM on Allwinner boards has a positive effect (a testing methodology exists but currently not for A64 -- see here results for H3 instead). I thought while torturing Pine64 that I maybe need a heatsink on the PMU since I managed to generate power-offs from time to time... but that wasn't the culprit.

The network chip on Pine64 is used in a 'passive' mode (it's just used as PHY doing the 'physical' stuff on network layer 1 while everything else is handled inside the SoC --> no cooling needed.

The only IC that remains is the SoC and this overheats pretty fast when running heavy workloads (applies to both CPU/GPU, the video engine isn't affected since HW accelerated decoding is pretty good optimised). The good news: Unless you run benchmarks there aren't that much demanding workloads available. So better start with the Ubuntu image, install the available monitoring solution and simply watch what happens and then decide whether you need a heatsink or not.

And while it doesn't hurt to apply a heatsink (the usual cheap ones help with 10°C-15°C less when overheating occurs) in case you really plan to do number crunching on the Pine64 then you have to take care of improved heat dissipation. In general that might work using huge heatsinks like on ODROID-C2 (small board not being bent, mounting holes on the PCB and same height of DRAM and SoC -- go figure) or by simply using the very same cheap heatsinks and some controlled ventilation ('some' is really enough when you do it intelligently: one large silent fan is sufficient for 20 Pine64 -- but most of the time enclosure makers don't think about controlling the airflow and use a couple of useless and annoying small fans blowing air from here to there but not directly over the heatsink's surface)

ATTENTION: If you manage to improve heat dissipation for a reason (since you really want to run demanding workloads) you created the need to overthink powering the board: Micro USB will then be not enough but you'll have to use the Euler connector (see 2nd link in this post) since you can manage that the SoC alone will then consume more than 2A when running for example cpuburn-a53.

[HappyFuzzy]

I've kept and ripped out all heatsinks from past computers, video cards, etc... I have a ton of different sized ones. Plus you can just cut them to fit with the right tools. Dig thru your stuff! Save money! ReUse!

[carb1a4h]

I've kept and ripped out all heatsinks from past computers, video cards, etc... I have a ton of different sized ones. Plus you can just cut them to fit with the right tools. Dig thru your stuff! Save money! ReUse!

Great idea!

[g_t_j]

Any news on the heatsink?

[SkimMilk]

Joining the thread. Any updates on heatsinks?