The benefit of heat sinks on a Pi-Hole, checked experimentally
14 March 2022
I recently got myself a Raspberry Pi 4 to use as a Pi-hole and wanted to understand whether it would benefit from heat sinks or not. Most answers online agree that it is not needed, but it doesn’t hurt. What I didn’t find was some proper before-and-after comparison in real life conditions, so I checked myself.
Experiment Setup
I run the Raspberry Pi in the official case and manage it headless over ssh. I prepared a script and a cron job to log the temperature every 10 minutes and save the result in a csv file. After running the Pi-hole naked for over a month, I applied thermal tape and heat sinks to the main components. I left it running for a similar amount of time and then checked the measurements.
Results
I got a 11 880 measurements in total with timestamp and temperature.
When applying the heat sinks I noted the time to know where to split the logs. There are 5 721 measurements without heat sink and 6 159 with it.
The average temperature is indeed lower with the heat sink (59.7° C vs 60.1° C). As I have several thousands data points, I can check whether the difference is also statistically significant. A proper statistical test in this case is the Wilcoxon rank-sum test (aka Mann-Whitney U test, not to be confused with the Wilcoxon signed-rank test).
The p-value turned out to be basically zero, so the null hypothesis is rejected and I feel confident that the difference is not by chance.
Conclusions
The temperature difference is statistically significant but practically insignificant. For low loads as with the Pi-hole, the temperature stays around a reasonable 60° C. Less than a Celsius degree difference is not worth the hassle of applying the heat sinks, but it might be for heavier loads.
Caveats
While I am happy with the results, a more scientifically accurate experiment would use multiple machines running in similar conditions. The weaknesses of my setup include:
- As I started the experiment in the spring and finished in the summer, the temperature could have been affected by the weather and heating at my apartment.
- The measurements with the heat sink were running afterwards and therefore with a more up-to-date and possibly more efficient software versions.
- I might have placed the thermal paste and the heat sinks poorly.
- There are different kinds of cases and thermal management solutions with possibly different results.
Links
- Mann–Whitney U test on Wikipedia.
- The Scipy implementation of the Mann–Whitney U test in Python.
Originally published at https://lucaf.eu on March 14, 2022.
