APU1C heat
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Need to find me some higher adhesive feets now…
Why? Use an adhesive heat sink, put a little rubber foot on the part that will touch the table/shelf/surface. Two in one. :-)
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Hi Jimp,
yes, I did order adhesive heat-sinks… but I flipped the enclosure upside down so the cpu, southbridge & heat-spreader are now facing up. So will the heat-sinks once they are mounted, and putting feet on top of them won't help much I'm afraid ;D
I temporary raised the enclosure with blocks (duplo, don't tell my kids ;)) and I'm overall satisfied with the result.
FWIW: Temperature of the case remains stable between 35°C (outside) and 40°C (center of heat-spreader).
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How does that compare with the original temperatures?
I'd guess that….
@bennyc:I can still touch it, but enough that it goes beyond my comfort zone.
…. is around 50ᴼC.
Steve
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No comparable data on that yet. I didn't take temperature readings on the case before these mods. (my bad ::))
I do remember this: when in bios, and I was doing memory test on the APU the core(s) temp was +-59,x°C (live counter in the bios). There is no other temperature sensor on the board to my knowledge, so difficult to say how hot the mainboard actually gets.
Also don't know if it would have reached 50°C, that seems rather high to me. Best comparison would be when someone else with a black case (~similar conductivity) does an ir temperature reading of both sides of the enclosures temperature during normal conditions. (environmental temperature here is 20°C)2nd problem is that my alix refused duty while testing the APU & is thus on the bench for repair. So the APU is in production use now. And, I have found no (easy) way yet to get the temperature from the cores in the gui (besides running 2.2).
I think that measuring the core's temperature should be a good indication for results, and lowering it is my goal. I'm expecting no miracles here, but every degree counts 8)
As soon as I get this alix back up & running, the saga continues…
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I temporary raised the enclosure with blocks (duplo, don't tell my kids ;)) and I'm overall satisfied with the result.
That's what I meant – use more tall heat sinks as "feet" in place of the Lego bricks. :-)
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Yeah my APU1C runs pretty hot also… lying down on my desk it hovers around 58c, standing up on it's side it's closer to 53 - 54c... haven't tried upside down yet but I will do later.
This is with a black case, the msata 16GB SSD installed, as well as a MC8775V 3G module that I haven't gotten around to playing with (since ppp isn't working via the WebGui in 2.2 yet).
I've also enabled powerd, so the CPU does drop down to 125Mhz when not doing very much.
[2.2-ALPHA][admin@pfSense]/var/etc(33): sysctl dev.cpu.0
dev.cpu.0.%desc: ACPI CPU
dev.cpu.0.%driver: cpu
dev.cpu.0.%location: handle=_PR_.C000
dev.cpu.0.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0
dev.cpu.0.%parent: acpi0
dev.cpu.0.freq: 1000
dev.cpu.0.freq_levels: 1000/-1 875/-1 750/-1 625/-1 500/-1 375/-1 250/-1 125/-1
dev.cpu.0.cx_supported: C1/1/0 C2/2/100
dev.cpu.0.cx_lowest: C1
dev.cpu.0.cx_usage: 100.00% 0.00% last 439us
dev.cpu.0.temperature: 53.3C[2.2-ALPHA][admin@pfSense]/var/etc(34): uname -a
FreeBSD pfSense 10.0-STABLE FreeBSD 10.0-STABLE #16 e852cd6(HEAD)-dirty: Thu May 1 22:16:16 CDT 2014 root@builder-10.0-b3-amd64:/usr/obj.amd64/usr/pfSensesrc/src/sys/pfSense_SMP.10 amd64I'm wondering if I could replace the head pads with something more conductive, or perhaps cut a hole in the bottom of the case and attach a better heatsink… or maybe the value is being read wrong and it's much lower than that... who knows.
$0.02
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The case itself is aluminium so there would be little point it cutting a hole in it as long the CPU/APU is in good contact with it. Attaching a large heatsink to the outside of the case nearest the APU and mounting it vertically (such that the heatsink fins are vertical) is likely to make the largest difference IMHO.
Steve
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moving air across the case is likely to help more
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Yeah maybe.
I don't normally use thermal pads, i've always had better luck with high quality thermal paste personally. If I cut a hole in the side i'd get rid of the 2x thermal pads, and have one big heatsink with a thin layer of good paste… not sure how i'd stick the sucker on, i'd prefer not to use thermal apoxy heh :)
Just throwing around ideas at this stage :)
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@gonzopancho:
moving air across the case is likely to help more
Yes, I should have said; while remaining a passive cooling solution.
@drclaw I've never been a fan of those thermal pads either. Every laptop with a toasted graphics chip I've looked in seemed to be using one. I've replaced a few with copper shims before but you have to get the thickness and placement perfect.
Steve
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Now my Alix is back in use, got to 2.2 through usb boot. And surprise-surprise: we have a working thermal sensor 8)
Seems my cpu is hoovering round 51-52°C, and that is without added heatsinks (not arrived yet…. patience is a virtue)
This is without much load (almost none), and PowerD not activated. It tends to go up rather fast when asking actions from the system (packages, configuration changes in the gui, ...) but equally drops pretty fast. (good thing, means the heat gets dissipated ;))
I activated PowerD for testing (as quoted by drclaw), but doesn't seem to make much difference when there's not much going on (seems logic)
I'll report back when those chinese heatsinks are mounted.....ps: enjoying the 103% disk usage here ! (I always love it when a system gives me more than it should ;D)