Geekworm for Raspberry Pi 4 Aluminum Case, Heavy Duty Passive Cooling Metal Case/Housing with Heatsink Pillar Compatible with Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Only-Black (P173)

TL;DR: Excellent case for the money, great performance for a simple Home Assistant dashboard, and silent.Use Case: I am currently using a Raspberry Pi to run a Home Assistant dashboard in my office. I was using a different heatsink with a small fan. The fan would turn on periodically throughout the day and became quite distracting for the few degrees improvement it caused, compared to if it stayed off entirely. I experimented with a handful of cases and heatsinks until I eventually landed on this item. Wow, to say the least. It brought my temperatures down from 55-60 to 35-40. All of this without the use of a fan. No complaints and I'm glad I landed on this product.Build Quality: Feels sturdy and no complaints. The paint has some blemishes, but nothing that detracts overall from its look and performance. The product does come with a copper plate for covering the CPU. Per the instructions provided, I applied thermal paste on both sides of the copper plate and then only put the smaller thermal pads over the three other chips.Performance: Excellent. The CPU temperatures exceeded my expectations and it's silent. The entire case is made out of metal, so the case does transfer heat from the Raspberry Pi. For my use case, this isn't a problem. It's just slightly warm to the touch, and still cooler than any laptop bottom would be after a few hours of use.

I wanted a quality case that would do a good job of cooling without needing a noisy fan that would also be prone to failure after what is often a short period of time. Since I was using this in a home media center situation this case really fit the bill. It is well constructed and the board fit was spot on.

I have four Raspberry Pi 3's and all four are installed in these aluminum cases. The cases are sturdy, with openings properly positioned. They're designed to heat-sink to the hot chips on the Raspberry Pi boards and do an effective job of keeping them cool without need of a fan.

I have a ADS-B rig that runs 24-7, i went from an average of about 54 degrees C to approximately 37 degrees C.My old cooler was an active cooling setup with a small fan. This case is awesome!

Just received this package hours ago, below is the temperature measurements with this metal chassis. I have Raspi 4B in this case, it is well built product, fits precisely, top cover with extenders direct touch into the chipsets, except the radio (WIFI) IC, not sure why this one is ignored! It is running hot as well. The Pi4 drives the 4k@30 on HDMI with two USB attached devices, it consumes 5.167V, 0.855A which is 4.217W. After 30 minutes of operation I measured 99.6F, thermal probe on top of the chassis and 110.8F when probe inside the chassis. The chassis is warm but touchable. Overall, this metal chassis design really help to reduce the operation temperature. I plan to use this system as NAS, use 1G ETH to router and free running all by itself. According to this measurements there is no need for cooling fan, less failure!

It's a fine little kit, and it is priced right.I used the included copper shim and some Arctic Silver instead of the thermal pad for the CPU. It seems to have the right amount of squish on the thermal interfaces to keep everything held together and smoosh things out appropriately.All of the thermal pads (there are two sets of 4) were cut to the right shapes, and had protective plastic on both sides which must be removed for optimal performance. One extra screw is included, along with an Allen key for tightening the screws.It cools the CPU, the RAM, the PMIC, and the USB 3 hub chip.No provision is included for cooling the Wifi chip, but none is needed or useful (and on the Pi4's PCB, the metal can covering the wifi chip doesn't actually touch anything that gets warm anyway -- there is nothing to cool here, by nature of the Pi4's design. The can improves RF interference and light sensitivity vs the Pi3B's design, which used a similar chip but as a bare unprotected silicon die).I wanted a better cooling solution for a Pi4 (I'm going on a adventure that is going to include using a Raspberry Pi on battery power while camping in the Florida sun), and I'm allergic to using noisy fans for such low-power applications. This will work great: It uses zero energy and offers wonderful thermal dissipation -- more than plenty to dump the Pi4's maximum heat output of around 6.4 Watts.In its present duty, running Kodi with LibreElec on the living room TV: It works fine. No issues. Reported temperatures while watching a film in a 68-degree room with minimal airflow are around a very-chill 31C, which is 49 degrees below the throttle temperature (and 54 degrees below the maximum allowable operating temperature) of the Pi4. I could overlock it and put the hammer down, but meh:Provisions are made for running the GPIO out with a 40-pin ribbon cable, if tinkering is in order.The finish is a nice, semi-matte black. It was consistent on the unit I ordered.One star deducted because the screws were more difficult to get started than I anticipated. It's a little bit unnerving holding the case closed with one hand (to keep the thermal interfaces where they need to be) and starting screws with my other hand. A little bit of a chamfer would completely resolve this issue, but I shouldn't have to add that myself.It would also be more-ideal if the aluminum posts molded into the top-half of the case were unpainted where they contact the parts being cooled. They're beefy and solid aluminum, and that's quite good, but the main goal of a case like this is to conduct heat and paint gets in the way of that goal.

Nice quality, keeps the PI cool and I dont have to listen to a bad fan anymore.

This case didn't come with any thermal compound. So be sure to get some if you decide on using the copper plate. It's a great case for cooling. Running `vcgencmd measure_temp` gives me less than 45'C. I would have gladly paid double for this case.Sidenote: At first I was wondering why `vcgencmd measure_temp` was giving me 55'C when the other case I bought (from a different brand, Miuzei) was 45'C. Later, I realized I had forgotten to apply thermal paste on both sides of the copper plate. Forgetfulness on my part. After I fixed my error, temperature declined from 56'C to 43'C. (The thermal paste I used was pretty old. I bought it in 2014: Arctic Silver Ceramique 2 Tri-Linear Ceramic Thermal Compound. Although, the brand of the thermal compound doesn't really matter. Any thermal compound with good reviews should be effective.)