Raspberry Pi: Bring the chill to your Raspberry Pi 4 for just US$20 with an ICE Tower CPU Cooling Fan

Single board computers (SBCs) tend to passively cool their SoCs, primarily because they generate little to no heat compared to even their laptop equivalents. Companies like FLIRC have produced cases with built-in heatsinks for the Raspberry Pi though, should you have a project that performs prolonged multi-core tasks. Undoubtedly, the RPi 4 runs hotter than its predecessors, with the Pi Foundation having already released a firmware update to address SoC temperatures on its latest SBC.

Still, the RPi 4 will run hot when executing multi-core applications or 4K video at 60 FPS. Fear not, as Seeedstudio has developed the ICE Tower CPU Cooling Fan, which works with all Raspberry Pi SBCs including the RPi 4. Pictured connected to an RPi 3, the ICE Tower sits atop of the SoC like a conventional CPU air cooler and is secured to the board via four RPi mounting holes. The ICE Tower requires 5 V power, which it can receive via your board's 40-pin GPIO.

Seeedstudio claims that the ICE Tower can reduce the core temperatures of the RPi 4 from 80 °C to 40 °C, which is some claim. We presume that this applies to temperatures during multi-core work, but it would be interesting to see the degree to which it reduces idle temperatures. If you fancy trying the ICE Tower CPU Cooling Fan out for yourself, which we are planning to do, then you can purchase it from Seeedstudio for US$19.90. The company ships worldwide from July 19 and sells numerous other RPi accessories too if you are building a new project.