Raspberry Pi launches official case fan accessory

The Raspberry Pi 4 SBC has been on sale for around 17 months now. In that time, there has been a thriving market for accessories for the device including after-market cases that include active cooling solutions. Although the SBC is designed to keep working when passively cooled only, there are some users that like to push it to its limits with sustained computing tasks including using it as a game emulator or for crunching data in scientific projects such as Rosetta@home.

Whatever your reason for wanting to max out the performance of your Raspberry Pi 4, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has now launched an official Case Fan cooling kit. It is designed to be retrofitted to the existing official Raspberry Pi case meaning that existing or new customers have an option to upgrade their thermal solution. This will work particularly nicely for fans of Raspberry Pi’s other Pi 4 accessories, including a keyboard, which are all color matched -- previously you would have had to buy a non-matched third-party alternative.

The fan itself is designed to fit perfectly into the lid of the Raspberry Pi 4 official case. It connects physically to the included heatsink component (18 mm x 18 mm x 10 mm) that includes a self-adhesive pad that is used to attach it to the top of the SoC. The temperature-controlled fan delivers up to 1.4CFM of air flow over the processor, memory and power management IC to keep things working within the optimal performance range.

The official Raspberry Pi Case Fan kit retails for US$5, which when combined with the official case, takes the total to just US$10.