Here is my Pi4 running on 3 cores at stock speed, and using this heatsink:

https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/aluminium-heatsink-case-for-raspberry-pi-4?variant=29430673178707

https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/show_host_detail.php?hostid=4021327

---

If you bought the Pi4 and didn't do anything but slap the included cheap heatsinck on the CPU, or put it in the Official Pi case it will run hot. Even a simple usb fan just blowing over the case will cool it down. I have 3 different pi 4 boards all running cool. One uses a Flirc Case, Another just has a simply acrylic fan that is blowing on the CPU, and the last has the top of the official case (top off) with a 120mm usb fan blowing on it. All Stay fairly cool I like the Flirc case the most though because it appears to be the cleanest look.

What i am noticing is that they don't have enough portal work units. I have one pie that is getting work units while my other one that is currently setup to help isn't getting any.

Could anyone here please share what power consumption a fully loaded Raspberry Pi 4 has without anything plugged in other than power & SD card (i.e., no HDMI, network, USB)?

By the way, if you added 4GB zram, I think it could run 4 tasks at a time.

Pimoroni is the solution

They are not suitable for constant running. They only last about 3-4 months. I’ve already had to throw 2 out of 3 in the bin. The 3rd was a replacement under warranty and isn’t as old. I expect it to fail too. The fans seize up.

I have some 3 year old Noctua 40mm fans that I have been using on the Pi’s that are still going strong. They cost more but as the saying goes, you get what you pay for.

---

MarksRpiCluster

I have a cluster of 5 raspberry pi 4's . Thanks to the tips on this thread here I was able to get Boinc/Rosetta running on one. Before I deploy to the remaining pis, I had two questions:

1) I am using a POE hat to power it. It includes a fan. Is this enough to keep it cool? If not, how can I automate monitoring the temperatures?

2) Any more details of the compatibility issues when switching to the aarch64 ? I use these pis to record videos . That still seems to work. Though I am now exclusively using it to run rosetta.

Great work! To simply answer the first question, keep monitoring its temperature and performance, because it should start throttling above a certain level.

Depending on where you would like to graph the results and if you would like alerting you have lots of choices.

This should return your CPU temperature:

cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp

And this one your GPU temp:

vcgencmd measure_temp

.

Here are some example plugins:

- Munin: https://github.com/gajdipajti/munin-rpi-temp
- Nagios: https://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Plugins/Hardware/Others/check_rpi_temp-2Epy--2D-Raspberry-Pi-temperature/details
- Icinga: https://exchange.icinga.com/Napsty/check_rpi_temp
- ...

I think any kind of fan should be capable of cooling a 5W chip, that was just about the level where they started adding simple active cooling solutions in PC's for the 80486. Here are some nice heatsink benchmarks just for fun: https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/articles/group-test-best-raspberry-pi-4-thermal-cases-tested-and-ranked

To reduce temperature, you may consider trying undervolting and/or underclocking.

Could you perhaps share your power consumption? You could measure it via either a dedicated main lines voltage tap, a portable USB charger with this feature or perhaps your laptop's built in power gauge if you have an extra-duty charging port (i.e., by subtracting plugged in vs. idle power of the machine).

Thanks for the very informative reply! The heatsink study was interesting . I have been monitoring the pi temps manually with the commands you sent. It seems to be around 60C. Although right now one pi I am not able to SSH into to ( it is hanging ), presumably from being overloaded with a boinc job. So that temperature I am guessing would be higher..

I am not sure I can monitor power consumption as they are being run via power over ethernet ( POE ).

It finally let me ssh into my hanging pi that was running some boinc job. When I did a top it showed:

load average: 33.76, 68.52, 62.02

It should not be above 4, since the pi only has 4 cpus. It looks like the code spawned maybe 64 threads instead of just 4 ?

Do you have a cc_config or an app_config file created on it? There is a setting somewhere that requests more tasks than the number of CPUs would normally warrant.

---

Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

I checked and do not see anything in my cc_config file relating to number of cpus. Here are the contents of it:

<cc_config>
<log_flags>
<task>1</task>
<file_xfer>1</file_xfer>
<sched_ops>1</sched_ops>
</log_flags>
<options>
<alt_platform>aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu</alt_platform>
</options>
</cc_config>

Have you updated your boot loader? They say it improves power consumption a lot:
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-4-might-not-need-fan-anymore
I found another command you may find useful to determine the clock speed hinting at throttling:

vcgencmd measure_clock arm

- via https://www.scivision.dev/raspberry-pi-check-temperature-of-cpu/. I also like their minimalistic solution of logging to cron, though I usually log power & temperatures in the same line.

Check these:

free
zramctl
cat /proc/swaps
ps -e v|grep -i boinc
boinccmd --get_tasks
top -n 1|head -n 20

Reduce the amount of tasks you request to the minimum and disable "keep suspended tasks in memory".

The three ARM hosts associated with your profile all have less than 17 tasks, many of which are completed. So the process counts shown in your load average cannot all be BOINC processes.

---

Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

Hard to know what exactly was going on as I could not ssh into the machine. But my guess is sometimes the task run multiple threads or something. For example I saw today a boinc process using 180% cpu. So it was using two threads.. Normally it should not go above 100%.

I would need to look at the source code to see what kind of parallel calculations they are trying to do.

The only thing I've seen others report, that would use more than one thread is that when tasks first start they have to unzip some databases and etc. for the task to use. Some have reported that the unzip process is multi-threaded, or can become multi-threaded in some environments.

---

Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

hi some quick questions, the raspbian buster distribution is 32 bits i think. even for pi4
would that be able to receive r@h boinc tasks as it sounds like the tasks are 64 bits?

hi some quick questions, the raspbian buster distribution is 32 bits i think. even for pi4
would that be able to receive r@h boinc tasks as it sounds like the tasks are 64 bits?

This guide

---

reminder to anyone setting up raspbian (I forgot), ssh is disabled by default (yes, it seems they are specifically trying to make your life difficult). You need to create a file called "ssh" file on / to be able to ssh to the pi to get started.

As of last night, my pi 4 4GB is configured, running with zram (just in case I get a couple of large work units, i still want it to be processing with 4 CPUs) and Over night it picked up 4 work units.

Temp processing 4 WUs is 57c in the Flirc case - it’s actually so low I’m wondering what’s wrong. I was expecting higher than a pi 3 in a Flirc case with all the reports of the pi 4 being hot..,

somewhat off topic, there is this ice-tower cpu cooler for Pi 4 that seem to have pretty good soc cooling performance, you can find them on aliexpress
https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/07/25/review-raspberry-pi-4-ice-tower-cooling-fan/

as for myself i did some tests with a low cost 28 mm x 28 mm x 11 mm heat sink, adhered with some cheap thermal compound (those for cpu and gpu mostly works)
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=271933
temperatures are somewhat lower rather than hot, but i'm not sure if running with only a heat sink and no fan is adequate to keep temperatures low in those loads