This is a significant point of difference between the GemPro case and some of the more extreme active cooling methods we have seen for the Raspberry Pi 4. The blocks are attached to the case via a thermal paste. It has two machined aluminium blocks designed to draw heat from various areas of the Raspberry Pi and into the aluminium of the enclosure itself. The enclosure requires a little assembly before use.
The wires you connect to the GPIO port or camera etc are required to be routed out of this small slot on the side of the Gem Pro case.įinally, while assembly is fairly straight forward, instructions are included to get you going without too much fuss. This seems to have been a bit of an afterthought. The most egregious issue we noticed was that the GPIO header was broken out on the lower side of the case, requiring the connected cables to be manipulated at odd angles to exit the enclosure. This would make it much easier to create a VESA bracket, for example, which would allow you to mount the Raspberry Pi to the back of your monitor or Television. It would also be nice to have some pre-tapped mounting holes in the rear or bottom of the case so you could mount the enclosure. The screws in the bottom of the case are countersunk so they fit flush with the case and won’t scratch your desk’s surface, however, we think rubber feet to hold it off your desk’s surface would be a great addition allowing airflow under the case as well as over. There are, however, a couple of things missing that we would have liked to have seen included. Overall, the quality looks and feels amazing and would look great on any desk. This could also be an issue with the cable rather than the enclosure, but it is certainly worth mentioning.
Bumping the cable would result in losing the image on the screen. Whilst this will likely work fine with many types of micro HDMI cables, ours struggled to make a reliable connection.
The holes to the micro HDMI, audio, and USB-C connectors are precision cut into the side of the enclosure, and there is no recess around the micro HDMI inputs to accommodate the overmolding on some micro HDMI connectors. The top of the enclosure has a pattern that appears to be milled into its surface that somewhat resembles a cobblestone path and certainly makes the design unique looking.
The enclosure consists of two main pieces that are screwed together, and both have a sandblasted textured finish. Simply put, this style of passive cooling case uses the entire enclosure itself as a heatsink, and thus, the more material and surface area the better the cooling potential. This heft is a good sign and adds quite a bit of veracity to support the claims made in relation to this case's cooling abilities. The case itself is made from forged or cast aluminium and is a surprisingly hefty 262.7 grams when loaded with the Raspberry Pi and SD card. With that said, we put the GemPro case to the test to see if it did what it claimed. With this in mind, when we heard that there was a passive cooling solution for the Raspberry Pi which would keep the temperatures low enough to prevent thermal throttling at stock speeds, we were a little dubious. On the Raspberry Pi 4, this thermal throttling begins at around 80☌. DFS and DVS are the methods used to reduce the performance of a chipset in order to reduce the junction temperature, and are often simply referred to as thermal throttling. This causes the ARM quad-core chipset to protect itself by reducing performance using dynamic frequency scaling (DFS) and dynamic voltage scaling (DVS). Whilst many of the heat issues plaguing the Raspberry Pi 4 have been alleviated with firmware updates to dramatically reduce the power dissipation at idle and medium loads, the Raspberry Pi 4 still gets blisteringly hot when pushed with higher loads. This initially resulted in some pretty crazy active cooling designs on the market for the Raspberry Pi 4. If you have had any experience with the Raspberry Pi 4 and especially closer to its launch, you would have likely become aware that this iteration of the Raspberry Pi gets quite toasty under a moderate load. Highly effective Raspberry Pi cooling without the need for a fan.