“The look and feel of this case does everything to make a budget computer appear so much more, whether it’s the contrast between the shiny silver and Matt grey colour, the weight of the heat dissipating, metal body, or the sensual marriage of cold and smooth sides with the warmer suede feel of the top and bottom plastic sheets.
All beautifully engineered to accurately match the ports and micro SD card of the Pi, and contain it within a simply shaped box.
If forced to criticise, I would have to say the only 2 problems would be with:-
1) The tapped posts for the screws securing the Pi inside: when used with the Adafruit T-Cobbler ribbon, to introduce the Pi to a breadboard, the length between the posts flanking the Pi’s GPIO pins proved too small to accommodate the ribbon’s end connector. For those determined, however, they can shave the ends of the plastic connector, to fit, although this does compromise the security of the connector if they would want to use it for something else, further down the line.
2) For those wanting to use the DSI port for connecting a screen directly to the Pi, this case does little to solve the problem of breaking it out. The choice for them is to either find an alternative case, or finish the engineering of this one.
All in all, for the majority of Pi users, it’s a grand house for a great piece of tech!”
“This case looks good, but the primary reason I got it was for its heat sink capabilities. The Pi 4 runs pretty hot and the case is great for dissipating that.
The only design flaw from my point of view is not being able to get at the GPIO pins after the case is affixed. There is a slot to take a cable out; that's well and good. But attaching a cable after the fact means dismantling the case and perhaps losing the effectiveness of the heat sink spacer.
Overall though, a very good looking case that protects the Pi in its travels and helps with smooth running.”
“I was previously concerned at the 3+ running at 50-60C, although possibly needlessly! I read a lot about overheating on the 4+, again possibly needlessly. I decided to solve the possibly non-existent problem with this case, and it works. It idles along at 43 or so, and if give it some work to do with several browser tabs and some Julia calculations it rises to about 50-53. I ran it bare before putting it inside the case and it went to over 60 before impatience got the better of me. You can't, of course, easily take it out of the case because the lid is now glued to the CPU by the heat transmitting pad, but I wasn't planning on taking it out. I think you would just slowly ease the lid off without difficulty and it MAY be possible to reuse the pad. I'm very pleased at not having to bother with a fan. Looks good too.”
“I use the Pi-4 as a 24/7 NAS for my various IP cameras, running the excellent OpenMediaVault package. It is in a fairly dirty and dusty environment so needs to be in a fully enclosed case with no fans. The Pi was running a lot hotter than I felt comfortable with in the standard official case (typically ~ 65°C), but in the FLIRC that is a much cooler 40-41°C. The whole case feels uniformly slightly warm, so it is doing an excellent job of dissipating heat from the CPU.
One word of warning though - to get access to the various headers after assembly you need to break the thermal bond between the CPU and case, as the Pi fits in the case from the bottom, and the "lid" is actually the base. Easy enough to do, but it will need a new thermal pad, and no spares are provided with the case.”
“Running "stress", the highest temperature I can get vcgencmd to admit to is 61C, with ambient around 24C. This case does work very well to shed excess heat. I'll be buying one of these for every RPi4 I buy from now on.”
