Raspberry Pi 4 heatsink placement

In this short tutorial we see where to place the heatsinks on the Raspberry Pi 4. After having completed this tutorial, your Raspberry Pi will be equipped with the necessary heatsinks to keep it cooler.

In contrast to the previous Raspberry Pi models where a set of heatsinks was just advisable and not always necessary, with the Raspberry Pi 4 we have a completely different situation. Here the CPU gets really hot under normal load or even at idle. If the board is mounted in a closed enclosure (as the official Raspberry Pi case), the CPU starts to throttle in no time and consequently a loss of performances is inevitable.

Placing heatsinks on the CPU will certainly help to dissipate the heat. But if you use a closed case, there is very little chance for the heat to dissipate. Because an effective heat dissipation solution is really critical for the Raspberry Pi 4, beside placing the heatsinks, we advise to use a well ventilated case and / or a case provided with a fan.

Prepare your Pi

Which components of your Raspberry Pi 4 are getting hot?

• The processor is by far the component which really gets hot. A Raspberry Pi 4 board without case, without heatsinks, running at idle reaches easily a temperature of about 60°C ! The CPU temperature increases to more than 80°C with a board in a closed case and a CPU loaded at 25%. Luckily there is a built in sensor that sets the CPU to throttle as soon as 80°C is reached. This behavior avoids furhter increase of the temperature, but affects the performance of the processor of course.
• the temperature of the USB controller will increase depending on the type and number of connected USB devices.
• finally there is the Ethernet controller

Remark : The RAM doesn’t add additional heat to the board. It’s useless to put a heatsink on this component.

Place the heatsinks

Let’s see now where to place the heatsinks on the Raspberry Pi 4 board …

As shown in the figure, it is very easy to place nicely the 3 heatsinks which are already provided with thermal adhesive.  

What to do if the heatsinks can’t cool enough your Pi ?

Check if your case allows enough heat dissipation. If your case is totally closed, placing heatsinks won’t help a lot as the heat won’t dissipate. So, the first thing to do is to consider a case with enough openings. An open case allows passive heat dissipation from the heatsinks which really makes a big difference.