By coincidence, someone’s just posted a test of different TIMS for coolers. There are some TIMs that perform significantly worse than ketchup or toothpaste, about the same as a slice of cheese or potato.
Some pushpins don’t - if you have some that are quite low-profile then they can sit under the M.2 drive comfortably. I did install the pushpins without the M.2 drive installed so that I didn’t accidentally “punch through” to it when squeezing the pushpins in.
In the image you can see there’s at least a couple of mm clearance between the pins and the M.2 drive:
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Great. And that’s the Odroid XU4 fan you mention above? Can this be purchased independently?
And that’s the Odroid XU4 fan you mention above?
It is.
Can this be purchased independently?
It can be bought standalone, yeah - I got mine from Odroid Cooling Fan XU4 but it also seems to be available here: Cooling Fan XU4 Blue – ODROID (not sure where you’re located - in the UK I ordered mine and got it the following day).
Went ahead and ordered the XU4Q one (fanless, taller). Elsewhere, due to location/shipping.
It’ll likely take a couple of weeks to arrive, but I’ll be sure to do some load testing without and then with.
Fingers crossed about the mount tabs not being gigantic.
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Update: XU4Q heatsink arrived. This is a fully passive solution.
I used Artic MX-4 as thermal interface.
Test: nbench, 4 threads, infinite loop: while [ 1 ];do ./nbench;done
Ambient temp: 24C for both tests.
Time: checked both at 15m mark.
From /sys/class/hwmon/hwmon0/temp1_input
w/o heatsink: 72282 (72.3C)
w/ heatsink: 55807 (55.8C)
It seems to do the job, no fan needed.
There is some 1-2mm clearance, eyeballed, from the height of the M.2 screw to the heatsink retaining clips.
edit: I have now installed an SSD (Patriot P300) w/o issue.
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In the meantime, I ordered a Heat sink with fan for Odroid XU-4 - blue for each of my two VF2s and they were delivered within four days. And Botland sells cheaper and without penalty fee. I have combined the heat sinks with one NF-A4x10 5V PWM each, which I am still controlling with an Adafruit EMC2101 I2C PC Fan Controller on a Raspberry Pico W for the time being.
But I want to try if I can control the PWM fan directly on GPIO46 using Kernel driver pwm-fan.
VisionFive 2 40-Pin GPIO Header User Guide
Intel spec for 4-Wire PWM Controlled Fans
I would like to warn you not to connect normal 5V fans with two pins directly to a CPU, only real PWM fans with separate power supply and PWM control input may be used!
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I had specially ordered the same cooler that you use, but my M.2 drive was still bending, although now much less. After I took another look at your photo, I realised that your M.2 drive is not equipped on the underside.
I wouldn’t have ordered the 512GB NVMe with cache for the VF2 at Christmas if my employer hadn’t given me an Amazon voucher. Now I’ve ordered a 256GB NVMe without cache because it’s single-sided and this one doesn’t bend anymore.
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