First of all, thank you very much to this great community. Little by little I am learning more and more about this great operating system.
The question is this: at rest I run around 47c 48c with the argon box. When it is at these temperatures the fan is not spinning. When I do a 5-minute stress test, it reaches a maximum of 60/61C and the fan sounds soft.
The question I have in iddle, could it be lowered from those 47c? lowering the minimum frequencies? or is there a way to make the fan active soft at those 47c
You can configure 4 points with temperature and hysteresis.
The speed is pwm so 0 to 255.
With piStats -v you can see actual fan rpm and its pwm value.
fan_temp0 Temperature threshold (in millicelcius) for
1st cooling level (default 50000). Pi5 only.
fan_temp0_hyst Temperature hysteresis (in millicelcius) for
1st cooling level (default 5000). Pi5 only.
fan_temp0_speed Fan PWM setting for 1st cooling level (0-255,
default 75). Pi5 only.
fan_temp1 Temperature threshold (in millicelcius) for
2nd cooling level (default 60000). Pi5 only.
fan_temp1_hyst Temperature hysteresis (in millicelcius) for
2nd cooling level (default 5000). Pi5 only.
fan_temp1_speed Fan PWM setting for 2nd cooling level (0-255,
default 125). Pi5 only.
fan_temp2 Temperature threshold (in millicelcius) for
3rd cooling level (default 67500). Pi5 only.
fan_temp2_hyst Temperature hysteresis (in millicelcius) for
3rd cooling level (default 5000). Pi5 only.
fan_temp2_speed Fan PWM setting for 3rd cooling level (0-255,
default 175). Pi5 only.
fan_temp3 Temperature threshold (in millicelcius) for
4th cooling level (default 75000). Pi5 only.
fan_temp3_hyst Temperature hysteresis (in millicelcius) for
4th cooling level (default 5000). Pi5 only.
fan_temp3_speed Fan PWM setting for 4th cooling level (0-255,
default 250). Pi5 only.
@mannix
How cool, waiting for that tutorial. thank you
I have another question for you
What does the hysterist line mean to you when I put in the config.txt that the fan turns on at 48c, it turns on at 45c?
I have discovered several bugs in my argon case for the raspberry pi5. 1 fan screw is too long and even pierces the CPU thermal pad a little. (I had to reduce it a little) 2 failure: a screw that tightens the red casing in one corner cannot go in completely and leaves the red cover somewhat loose
3 worst failure: the gray thermalpad that is placed on the pmic does not make contact with the chassis, it is very thin. The pmic reached 62c doing a stress test, I solved it by placing a thicker thermalpad, now it does not exceed 50c in stress and in iddle 48c
On the CPU, leave the factory gray thermalpad, it makes good contact and under stress it does not exceed 61c after 30 minutes of stress.
I have taken the opportunity to put a thermal pad on the WiFi and Bluetooth as well.
Ah, nice to know.
I’m swapping out an SSD to mount the Argon One V3 nvme.
Decided to get that one instead of the Neo 5 for the M.2.
Hopefully will be smoother…
The hysteresis is used to avoid the fan flapping to often up and down.
This is a very basic implementation but more or less works that in the +/- range you defined from the point the fan will be kept around that value.
You can see it running piStats -c and launching a load like a phoronix benchmark.
I have installed the Argon ONE case; some highs and lows.
It’s quite sturdy but not a lot, like the EDA TEC.
Cools down very quickly, seems well balanced.
Good enough to keep the SoC around 75c at 3 GHz.
The M.2 drive works flawlessly.
A couple of annoying issues.
The first issue was with the thermal pads; clearly a couple of pads for the Pi 4 SoC.
Not much of an issue with the PMIC, just oversized.
But too small for the Pi 5 SoC.
At first I re-used the thermal pad of the active cooler, it was just there.
Bad idea, the Pi 5 kept crashing at 3 GHz very easily under load.
Finally found an old MinusPad 8 and it made a huge difference.
But with such a good cooling it ended up crashing anyway, this is a bad bin, had to reduce to 2950 MHz.
Second issue is the fan.
It’s powerful, less noisy than the official case fan, optimal design.
But it does whine and badly. Like the very first small fans for notebooks 20 years ago.
It does rattle erratically and it’s very annoying.
Not a huge problem for me as this thing will be tucked away and most often not under load.
But I wouldn’t keep it a minute on my desk.
The other issue is the fan controller via GPIO; the Argon utilities are wacky at best.
At some point the fan stopped working or didn’t ramp to the maximum.
It’s much better to disconnect the fan from the HAT and use the onboard fan pwm connector.
But you have to dismount the top HAT, remove the cable and there’s no cable management.
It should have been more accessible, not really well done.
Temperature in idle is 42c, about 15c less than the official case.
Well, I listened to you and ordered a new Argon case with Nvme slot hehehehehe. Let’s see if you can explain to me how to correctly activate the NVME boot. This box does not have a slot to put the SD card in, but it is covered.
Argon has that defect with the thermal pads, I put the one it comes with on the CPU and the blue ones that the activecooler comes with on the pmic and wifi. I have to buy another activecooler to get the new thermal pads for when I get the new box of argon
As you can see the root is mounted on nvme0n1p2 instead of mmblk0p2.
Don’t use the thermal pad of the active cooler; it’s probably better an hot frying pan.
Buy a decent good cheap thermal pad with 1mm thickness, it makes a lot of difference.
