Quick Temperature Test of the Raspberry Pi 4 8GB


Raspberry Pi 4 8GB + heatsinks

 
I got the new Raspberry Pi 4 8GB few weeks ago, and I took at the same time a kit of four heat sinks designed for the RPi 4. Let’s see the processor temperature of the new RPi4 8GB with and withtout those heat sinks.

 
Heat sinks for the Raspberry Pi 4

 

1 – Raspberry Pi 4 8GB without heat sinks

 
Raspberry Pi 4 8GB

 
At idle (with the latest Raspberry Pi OS), the temperature of the processor was 55°C. The temperature has been measured with GL-Z as well as with RaspiOS built-in widget. The ambient temperature in the room was 21°C.

Raspberry Pi 4 8GB

 
Since an up to date version of the firmware is very important (see this article), I also checked the firmware version with the following command:

$ sudo rpi-eeprom-update

Raspberry Pi 4 8GB - VL805 firmware version

 
Perfect!

To stress test the Raspberry Pi 4, I used YAFFplayer. YAFFplayer is nice stress test tool because it has a multi-threaded video decoder (so the four cores of the RPi 4 CPU are loaded) and video is displayed using OpenGL. I played a 1920×1080 video until the temperature reached a maximum value of 74°C. As you can see on the following screenshot, the four cores are utilized and all clock speeds are pushed to the max.

Raspberry Pi 4 8GB - Stress test with YAFFplayer

 
74°C is a nice temperature for a Raspberry Pi 4 without heat sink.





 

2 – Raspberry Pi 4 8GB with heat sinks

Let’s put the heat sinks:

Raspberry Pi 4 8GB + heatsinks

Raspberry Pi 4 8GB + heatsinks

 
Temperature at idle: 52°C.

At idle, the heat sinks have an effect by removing 3°C.

Under load with YAFFplayer, the temperature reached 73°C. More or less the same value than without heat sinks.

A idle, these small heat sinks allow to reduce a bit the processor temperature but they are not very useful under load.

At the same time, all recent versions of the Raspberry Pi 4 have a better power consumption and temperature management compared to the first RPi 4 boards (80°C was a common temperature with those boards). So for moderate / short tasks, running the Raspberry Pi 4 without cooling is ok.

But a hot chip is never a good thing in the long term. If your really want to seriously reduce the temperature, a bigger cooler or an active cooler is required like this DIY cooler: ugly but efficient (32°C at idle).

4 thoughts on “Quick Temperature Test of the Raspberry Pi 4 8GB”

  1. andrew u frank

    What software GL_Z were you using with the Raspi 4? I downloaded from your website and got for the raspi “gl_z_temp_raspi/GLZ_0.5.0_rpi_gl2” but cannot run it on a Raspi 4, running with 64bit ubuntu (exactly the ubuntu_MATE distribution). I would like to see how effective the JOY-IT armor case is.
    thank you!

    1. JeGX Post Author

      The version of GL-Z for the Raspberry Pi has been compiled for Raspbian Buster / Raspberry Pi OS in 32-bit. So I’m not surprised it does not work on your ubuntu 64-bit.

  2. Terry

    I use armoured passive heat sink.
    Idle temp 52c.
    Thrashing the cpu all cores 70c.
    Then added a Corsair fan from pc. Placed the fan on 4 legs above the pi 4.
    Used a PSu with diff… voltage settings to change speed.
    The fan on low speed … all cores full stress test. Max temp 39c idle 28c.

    Works brilliantly. Whisper quiet.

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