Heatsink case for Raspberry Pi 4

Last year I acquired a Raspberry Pi 4 for running Home Assistant and some of my other home automation tasks. I bought the stock case to go with it, and unfortunately since I've had it, it has been running really hot, at times reach as high as 80 degrees. This is a well acknowledged issue, which had improved slightly with some firmware updates in recent months, but regardless I was a bit worried it was going to diminish the lifespan of the Pi 4.

So, I went looking for better cases, and came across a number of fanless heatsink cases, which seemed like a good solution as I'd already had some good experience with fanless heatsink cases for PCs. Anyway, I came across this heatsink case from Little Bird Electronics, from where I also purchased my Pi 4, and decided to give it a go.

You can see an image of the case below, so you know where this is heading.

So, the case arrived, and you can see the contents, and the Pi 4, below. The case also comes with some thermal tape which you can see attached to the appropriate chips on the Pi 4.

And here are some close ups of the top and bottom of the case.

The case was very simple to install, with just 4 screws holding the case together, and clamping the Pi 4 between the top and bottom parts. Access to ports and GPIO pins is still readily available.

Anyway, I rebooted the Pi 4 after installing the case, and the change in temperature was immediately apparent. I've been logging data from Home Assistant using influxdb and grafana, and so I was able to plot the difference over time.

Here you can see a time series plot of the last 30 days of CPU and ambient temperatures, with the date the case was installed readily apparent (approx 21 February).

And here is a correlation plot, which clearly shows the groups of data points from before and after the heatsink was installed. You can note that the CPU temperature has dropped by nearly 20 degrees for a given ambient temperature. You can also see a couple of groups of data points from before the heatsink case was changed, with the difference likely to be either due to a firmware update, or me leaving the original case lid slightly ajar to help keep the temperature down.

Needless to say, I was pretty happy with this result, and can now hopefully rest easily knowing my Pi 4 isn't frying itself.