Until I get around to writing something more interesting, I will share my most exciting purchase of the year: a Raspberry Pi tower cooler. It’s cool (literally). It’s also cute, a miniature of the huge coolers in an enthusiast desktop. It does RGB rainbow colors!
For $20, this S2Pi Tower cooler can be yours from any number of sellers on Amazon or elsewhere. That’s probably the biggest con – it is very expensive by Raspberry Pi cooling standards and costs over half the cost of a Pi computer itself. Still, twenty dollars is hardly a fortune.
There are ample reviews out there for this cooler. I stumbled upon it from this article. The only other negative of this fan is it won’t work with most cases. My current case, the official pi case, is basically an oven that cooks the Pi, so this should be an upgrade. Heat throttling is indeed a frequent problem with Raspberry Pis.
I, however, don’t think I will be leaving the fan on for this Pi. The massive tower heatsink in itself should provide plenty of cooling for most idle to moderate load conditions – just on passive cooling alone, it outperformed a standard Pi fan case as seen here.