Freezing A Raspberry Pi 4
Made by 314Reactor / Weather
About the project
It's summer time; so it's time to cool the new Raspberry Pi 4 in a crazy way!
Project info
Difficulty: Easy
Platforms: Raspberry Pi, Pimoroni
Estimated time: 2 hours
License: GNU General Public License, version 3 or later (GPL3+)
Items used in this project
Story
Why??
First off do not try this at home – it may damage your Pi or cause things in your freezer to thaw if the door is left ajar in anyway. This is a joke experiment, do not replicate! I take no responsibility for damaged Pi’s.
Anyway – it’s summer time at the moment and I just got my new Raspberry Pi through with a case from Pimoroni – and it looks so nice:
IMG_3495
But even with the big new heat sink on it still gets pretty toasty – especially around summertime.
Last year I did an experiment with using cooking oil to cool a Pi – while not exactly practical it certainly did the job in cooling the Pi down a good 22 degrees or so compared to passive air while running Quake 3.
So this year I thought about how I could one up myself with an even more ridiculous experiment – putting the Pi in a freezer!
What I’m using:
How?
For this experiment I’m going to:
- Run the Pi on air idle and get the temperature results – using the temperature script from my Oil-Cooled Raspberry Pi project.
- Run 4 instances of the Pi calculation script from my Raspberry Pi: Old vs. New post alongside GLXGears for 30 mins and get the temperature results.
- Put the Pi in my freezer and get the temperature on idle.
- Run the above tests again for 30 minutes and see get the temperature results.
And here’s the freezer that will being doing its best to cool the Pi:
High-tech.
I put the Pi in the quick-freeze department:
Quick freeze.
Results
As in the video – you can see it cut the under-load temps down by about 30 degrees; which is pretty decent; however not really worth the effort.
For comparison, my Oil Cooled project dropped the load temps by about 22 degrees; so not the greatest improvement.
Here’s the results from the freezer vs air:
Conclusion
As I say; this is more of a joke experiment just to see how the temperatures would drop in the freezer – it’s not meant to be a practical cooling solution. So again, don’t try this, especially not with a brand new Pi!
While the cooling results were pretty impressive, dropping the load temps to below the air idle temps; it wouldn’t be possible to have this running all the time.
It does, however, make me think about those super sub-zero coolers I’ve seen people use on desktop PC’s when overclocking – like this:
And makes me wonder; just how cool could you get a Pi?
Stay cool and see you next time…
Credits
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