Makes sense. I have nothing against fans as long as they’re reasonably quiet, almost all my devices have fans. My main concern was simply that if this device is going to be on most of the time, because these android boxes don’t come with power buttons, I would rather it not sit at 60 C forever. Setting up some kind of good sleep / wake system is another story though.
I just found a bunch of heatsinks on an old motherboard and video card, one of them is copper with a 45mm fan attached, let’s see what I can do.
I installed this heatsink from an old motherboard. The results are incredible! I tested watching 30 minutes of footage on the stock heatsink, and it was hitting around 65 C. Now, with the new sink it’s hitting around 43 C after a similar length of content. I was expecting maybe -5C not -22 C, that’s insane.
I feel like I may have shorted something out though by accident, now I’m getting " Source Too Slow For Continuous Playback " errors that I’ve never seen before.
if you didn’t make a short circuit during the installation of the heatsink … it’s probably a buffering problem
Does your BOX have a Gigabit network? ethtool eth0 | grep -i speed https://discourse.coreelec.org/search?q=buffering%20problem
I think performance is stil default governor in CE (?). I suggest to check in CE settings, and if yes, change it to the ondemand. I am using this governor for 24/7 boxes also, and for media center I didnt lack any of power or something like that. I mean, this step doesnt require any HW modification, which I would strongly suggest for X96 anyway.
P.S.: This is not intented to be anyhow related to the slow playback post…
Has anyone here tried taking a good heatsink applied with thermal paste vs the same heatsink applied with a high quality thermal pad to see how big the drop is? I want to use paste because of the high conductivity but I can’t think of any clever ways to keep it from falling off the chip.
Not worth the bother. When I tried it it was just a couple of C° degrees. More secure is the use of good thermal glue than paste/thermal pad. It will give good enough heat transfer and keep oversized heat sink from falling off.
When the metal heatsink is hot, the thermal pad works well. The problem is when the heat accumulates in the box and there is no way to get out. The larger metal heatsink that protrudes from the box is the solution, but keep in mind that not only does the processor heat up. For example, memory.
Just today I did a simple modification on an early model of X96 Air P2, famous for overheating. Drilled some holes in the casing and kept original heat-sink and thermopad. Under the heat-sink I placed an 1mm thick washer to distance it more from plastic casing and to get more pressure on original thick thermopad, turned the box upside-down and glued some rubber pads to let the air flow in from under the box:
Result: temperature drop in CoreElec from 58° to 42°C; temperature drop in it’s original Android from 68°C to 52°C after 6 hours of watching HD IPTV streams (hardware decoded).
Quite satisfactory for quick and simple modification; only one (1mm / fi 18mm) washer and 4 rubbers for water faucet repair needed.
Neat. I bought a 38x38x6mm chipset heatsink from aliexpress that I’ll be trying a similar solution with, the giant heatsink I tried earlier is just not practical.
It really is baffling how horrific the thermals of the X96 are given how nicely designed every other part of the device is.
Looks like the board designers had nothing to do with cheep plastic box design. That’s why I love Odroid N2 board design; you can put on it any cheep plastic box and it will still perform at it’s best
…still perform at it’s best even handling HDR10+ HEVC bitrate 50Mb/s at… 35-37°C
Yep, no other device with so low chipset’s temperature.
In comparison: I have Odroid-C2 located next to Odroid-N2 and in the idle mode it’s temperature is around 48°C jumping to 50-55°C when performing cron’s tasks: syncing files using proftpd, rclone, syncthing. When I was using C2 as my primary Kodi device (before I bought N2) I don’t remember what typical temperature was when playing HEVC with bitrate around 10-15 Mb/s… maybe just for curiosity I will check ?
After replacing my heatsink, the X96 will not even work unless I put a large amount of pressure on the board. I have no idea what’s going on, but basically the device is on, if there is no pressure there will be no video, if there is some pressure there will be video with lines and artifacts all over the screen, and if there’s a lot of pressure I can see the picture suddenly with no artifacts. Totally bizarre. I wonder if I damaged the BGA or something.
I wonder what box I should buy to replace it. My demands are so low now, all I’m doing is H265 1080p at most, and already have new heatsinks coming in the mail. You would think I would have learned my lesson about buying cheap android boxes.
edit: looks like the X88 box I was going to replace my X96 with already has a better stock cooling solution. What am I going to do with a bunch of chipset heatsinks?
