“I bought this for my son to help set up a Pi4 as a Plex server. I must admit I was doubtful whether the Pi would manage the heavy lifting of transcoding to a remote client, and if it did, that it would operate at a sensible temperature. I am amazed to report that all streaming is smooth and even serving a transcoded stream, it only reaches the low 50s Centigrade. Very unexpected. Very pleasing. The set up is whisper quiet.”
“I've done some tests with various combinations of cooler and fans. Ambient temperature was 20 degrees.
Results were:
1) Idle 50 deg, stressed 80 deg No cooling, just Pi4 bare board
2) idle 35 deg, stressed 49 deg Pi4 + Pimoroni fan shim
3) Idle 38 deg, stressed 51 deg Pi4 + Armor fan case with supplied "thermal" pads
4) Idle 32 deg, stressed 41 deg Pi4 + Armor fan case + 0.5mm copper shims and thermal grease, fans on
5) Idle 38 deg, stressed 53 deg As 4) but fans OFF
So my conclusions are, from tests 2 and 3, Armor fan case, when using supplied pads, is comparable cooling to the Pimoroni fan shim.
Armor case is awesome when removing the supplied thermal pads and replacing with a 0.5mm copper shim and thermal grease.
All tests done with Cristopher Barnatt's script on his YouTube "Explaining Computers" channel.
Overall, very pleased with this bulletproof case and cooling solution. Would have got 5 stars if it came with my copper shim mod.”
“It has fans. Two of them, and they spin when you connect them to the GPIO. The case is like, metal or something, and gets warm with the PI 4 on, so it's like, doing the thing it's meant to do. It looks like Darth Vader's PI so there's that also.
Highly recommended.”
“The screws have to be very loose for the fans, but aside that it is great.
Please note that you can use the "pinout" command to determine where you voltage and grounds are:
J8:
3V3 (1) (2) 5V
GPIO2 (3) (4) 5V
GPIO3 (5) (6) GND
In this case your Pinouts are as follows
4=Red and 6=Black”
“This is a well-designed, well-engineered and well made cooling solution that doubles up as a very robust "Pi Protector". 2 small issues:
1. The size of the "fan" screws is almost indistinguishable from the "case" screws and very easy to get wrong. Obvious when you've done it - the misplaced screw heads will sit proud above the fan tops - but it would have been better to either use uniform screw sizes or make the differences clearer.
Also, the photographs on the product page do not show the electrical connectors for the fans correctly positioned. Contrary to Andy J., below, you should NOT use pins 4 and 6. Instead, please refer here
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/usage/gpio/
to the original documentation for the GPIO header. Because there is no documentation it isn't clear if these are 3.3v or 5v fans - I've connected up as 5v and all seems well enough...”
