“An indispensable add-on for any Pi 3-4 being put through demanding workloads. The chips get hot, and when they do, suddenly your Pi's performance is decimated by frequency throttling. Heat-sinks alone won't prevent this (at least, not the discrete individual-chip heatsinks I tried). To prevent throttling, you'll need a fan.
The beauty of this fan is that it can be controlled through the software library written for it, which is easy to use (it comes with an installable example service that does the basic job most people will want and is easily tweakable to your tastes) and has lots of scope for more ambitious tinkering. At its simplest, this means the fan is only activated when things get hot. On my Pi 4 with the recommended settings, this meant the fan only span up for ~20 seconds every 3-5 minutes even when running Firefox in a full KDE5 desktop. And it's quiet enough I stopped even noticing it doing so after a while! (Note: I was also using heatsinks, for which a GPIO booster header is required to leave room under the fan for them.)
The RGB LED and (fiddly) push-button can also be fully controlled using the library, which opens up lots of additional possibilities for use. I'm looking forward to exploring this!”
“Great solution for keeping the Pi4 cool. Works better then any passive cooling solution, yet is whisper quiet.
Pimoroni's customer support is excellent! My initial order never arrived, so they promptly sent out a replacement.”
