I changed my Raspberry Pi fan for a Noctua NF-A4x10 5V PWM and had a 2° temperature drop compared to the GeeekPi case fan.
The items
When I bought my Raspberry Pi 4 in april 2021 here where the items that my setup was made of:
- a Raspberry Pi transformer, USB-C 5.1V 3A (1873421)
- a SanDisk Extreme 64 Go microSD XC, class 10, UHS-I, U3, V30
- a SanDisk Ultra 64 Go USB 3.0 key, theoretical read speed of 130 Mo/s
- a Raspberry Pi 4 B 8 Go 4x1,5 GHz, ARM Cortex-A72
- a GeeekPi Metal Case for Raspberry pi 4B low-profile ICE Tower cooler
A bit of story
Everything worked well for months but the two fans they provided with the case (one with fancy lighting) where making a terrible noise like they would crash anytime. Most probably because they where crappy quality fans.
I decided to buy a good (very good) fan and I found out that Noctua fans where the best fit.
So I ordered from LDLC a fan, the Noctua NF-A4x10 5V PWM. Was PWM needed, the answer is no. But it is a nice to have to make a fun project in the future.
It did come with some very cool packaging, very premium feeling and a lot of connectors.
The hacking part
The kit
Soldering time
Noctua did provide a nice adapter so I only had to cut out the old fan wires and solder them to the adapter. I used heat shrink tubes to make a nice and secure finish (the two red tubes you can see on the picture).
(The crapy background is my soldering board)
Plug the cable
I did plug the fan cable into the adapter and then plugged all this into the two GPIO pins as you can see.
Overview
The metal mounts for the fan where included in the setup of the GeeekPi case.
Some temperature numbers
Was this change worth it: yes ! It's cooler and more silent.
Here is the graph of before and after, you can clearly see a 2° difference !
The spike on the graph is the moment between having old fan and having no fan at all, just the cooler.
(The graph is done with Zabbix (a free tool), more on that in another blog post) (You can click the image to see it bigger)
Zoomed in
(You can click the image to see it bigger)
Conclusion
Noctua fans are great, the perform very well and are silent. I can only recommend to buy them. They provide cool wiring stuff, you will have left overs for other projects.
By the way they also do very good thermal paste.