Cooling The Raspberry Pi 4 With The Fan SHIM & FLIRC For Better Performance

The Fan SHIM tended to outperform the FLIRC by a few degrees, which isn't a surprise considering the active cooling, but the FLIRC stood up quite well in the testing.

Here is a look at the system temperature over the course of dozens of benchmarks carried out. Using no heatsink or a small aluminum cooler led to temperatures above 80 degrees while the FLIRC led to an average temperature of 60 and a peak of 72 while the Fan SHIM came in at 48 degrees with a peak of 61 degrees.

The geometric mean shows the FLIRC did experience some throttling resulting in slightly lower performance than the Fan SHIM, but not nearly as bad as using a basic aluminum heatsink.

More data can be found via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. Thanks to the Raspberry Pi Foundation for supplying the coolers tested in this article with both of them working out quite well depending upon whether you are looking for an active cooler or a passive cooling solution that also doubles as a durable Raspberry Pi case.