My Mars runs kinda hot, 53+C at idle in Debian GUI, and up to 78.5C after some file transfers. It seems like a heatsink would be a good idea. Does anyone have experience doing this? Would the VF2 thread on this topic be more or less applicable to the Mars?
Any suggestions would be welcome.
Oh, are there any cases for the Mars, that don’t involve 3D printing?
Any of the generic heat sinks would work. I plan on adding a few to my board. Cases for the raspberry pi 3 might work, but the microusb cutout on those cases won’t fit the usbc for sure. YMMV depending on which one you get. I haven’t tried a case yet.
The board layout is exactly like the rpi 3. It fits in all rpi 3 cases I’ve tried. On one case I had to open the whole of the usb C port , as the case was for micro usb and mars has C.
Thanks a lot! When you say the layout is the same, do you mean not only the ports, but also the layout of the SOC and USB chips, etc.? I’m looking at aluminum cases that have heatsinks that extend from the top down to the chips. The Vilros and Geekworm Armor case have generous cutouts on the micro USB port where I think USB-C might fit. The last one, another Geekworm case, has what appears to be a pretty tight fit on the micro USB. Did you try any of these cases?
No the chips are in different places, I should have been more specific. I did try one of the aluminum cases that have the head syncs and I did have to shave down the heat sync that extended to the board for my wifi card to fit. I have not tried the vilros or the geekworm case. Looking at the geekworm case it looks like you might have to dremel it a bit
LoveRPi Active Cooling Media Center PC Case is a plastic case with fan that works well with the Mars. I’ve also successfully used the metal case sold by Banana Pi meant for their BPi M4/BPi M5. I suspect that the KKSB ROCK 4 SE Case Aluminium would also work.
Installing a heat sink with a small fan can stabilize the temperature to about 45 ℃. In addition, you can manually reduce the CPU running frequency:
Obtain the frequency that can be set by the CPU through the following command