Adding more cooling to my HC1

[advanttage]

Hey all,

I recently decided to blow the dust off of my ODroid HC1 (I have a CS2 and HC2 both which I use in the office for storing video data that is used for separate YT channels) so I didn't really have much use for my HC1 and it sat.
When I was in Canada I had an old CoreDuo Lenovo desktop (the ol' horizontal stand your monitor on top of kind) that ran my Plex server, and since it basically only served up music to my dad and the occasional tv show to me, it was fine and dandy. Then I moved to Mexico, lost the ability to remote in to it, the Canadian ISP got upset about downloading stuff, etc...etc... So upon a return trip to Mexico I snatched the HDD from my dad's place and tried rebuilding my beloved Plex server using my Rock64....I still don't know what the heck I'll ever do with my Rock64 because it's just way too unstable.

Anyhow, back to what I'm trying to accomplish here. Turns out that in transit between Nova Scotia, Canada and Mexico City, Mexico... the HDD suffered a bit of damage. Not all is lost, I was able to recover some data but basically just began rebuilding my library from essentially nothing. I decided to throw a spinny disk into the HC1 and configure Plex with DietPi. I'm noticing that the temps like to chill out around 70-85C when I'm sending new video and audio files to it, and that's not even when I'm watching anything.

Basically I want to have some fun trying to make the cooling better. It's going to live in my bedroom, so I want to try and keep the cooling passive. At first I thought, hey let's order a thousand of the Pi heatsinks and just saturate the surface area of the HC1 with those... whynot?

What other creative solutions can you guys think of? I'll likely make a video comparing the different things I try.

I look forward to hearing your suggestions

Thanks,

Steve

[odroid]

As far as I remember, limiting the maximum clock speed of A15 big cores to 1.8Ghz from 2.0Ghz could reduce the CPU temperature significantly.
Try it first.
https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-xu4/appl ... q_govornor

[advanttage]

As far as I remember, limiting the maximum clock speed of A15 big cores to 1.8Ghz from 2.0Ghz could reduce the CPU temperature significantly.
Try it first.
https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-xu4/appl ... q_govornor

I will make a backup of my SD card and give it a shot! Thanks friend!

[powerful owl]

Please do post back with your results. I found that throttling my HC1s to 300/1200/conservative reduced normal/no load temps by 2-3 degrees only. With that said, I have three stacked on each other. I've come to the conclusion that a fan is necessary, SSD temps are reduced from ~42 to ~24.

[advanttage]

Please do post back with your results. I found that throttling my HC1s to 300/1200/conservative reduced normal/no load temps by 2-3 degrees only. With that said, I have three stacked on each other. I've come to the conclusion that a fan is necessary, SSD temps are reduced from ~42 to ~24.

I will definitely do that. Probably not right away, because I am going to try three different approaches. I would love to use an SSD, but at the moment all I have is spinny disks and I have better places to put 1 or 2 TB SSD's to work so it will probably stay with spinny disks, although for the sake of the experiment I might give an SSD a go.

This is my plan. It's definitely going to take more time than it's worth haha

ODROID HC1 Cooling Experiment
1. Generate a Baseline for temps w/ Spinny Disk
a. Generate a Baseline for temps w/ SSD
2. Underclock from 2.0GHz to 1.8GHz (refer to the ODroid Forum post I made for instructions)
a. Do the previous thing with SSD
3. Revert to stock clocks and replace Thermal Paste
a. Do the previous thing with SSD
4. Saturate the surface area of the stock heatsink with tiny Heatsinks
a. Do the previous thing with SSD

[mad_ady]

Just stick it in the fridge and be done with it

[advanttage]

Just stick it in the fridge and be done with it

I've done that with my OnePlus One before. My friend got a Nexus 6 when it was first released and he scored higher in Antutu than I did, so I overclocked to 2.8GHz and ran my test in the freezer. I then promptly forgot about it and found it a few hours later. Let it come to room temp on it's own and powered on to beat his score by a little bit. Overall a success.

[crazyquark]

I've been thinking about this as well, my HC1 runs a battery of dockers and it keeps pretty busy and is somewhat hot(80+ C). I was thinking more in the line of having a fan blowing air from the back on the heatsink but it ruins the form factor.
You could put all the odroids in a server cabinet that is cooled (instead of the fridge ), maybe?

I run DietPi as the OS and the MOTD warns me that my device is slowly dying each time I log in, oh well...

[powerful owl]

Have you checked your drive temp? That's the problem with "case as heatsink" design, it heats up the drive.

[mad_ady]

MOTD warns me that my device is slowly dying each time I log in, oh well...

Aren't we all? We're doomed since entropy can't be reversed... I admit, being constantly reminded of it can be depressing, so disable motd

[rooted]

MOTD warns me that my device is slowly dying each time I log in, oh well...

Aren't we all? We're doomed since entropy can't be reversed... I admit, being constantly reminded of it can be depressing, so disable motd

That's one way of doing it