I’m making a homeassistant sever with my raspberry pi and and i’m wondering since it’s going to be on 24/7 that the fans going to wear out much faster than intended. I can’t imagine that I would need a fan ontop of a heat sink and thermal paste it can’t get that hot? I should also note that i’m using an Argon V2 it’s one of those heat sink cases that are made for raspberry pis
- i like both the argon and the simple heatsink setups, either work great. i did end up adding an additional heatsink to the argon, the flat case does not provide great heat exchange in an enclosed space. - you can do passive cooling as well, just all depends on how hot the location gets. - probably gonna have it on a shelf next to my desk I also have a small bit strong small vornado fan I use to keep me cool. that hits my desk too - should be fine, if you don’t like how warm it gets a set of small heatsinks for amplifiers will run you a few bucks and takes all of 10 seconds to install. - ok thanks 
 
 
 
- I have had some pretty obnoxious recurring reboots on my Pi4 when I don’t add a heat sink and fan. 
- I highly doubt homeassistant will ever abuse the pi4 CPU enough to make active cooling necessary. As long as you have a heatsink of some form on the SoC you’ll likely be perfectly fine. Obviously monitor it for core temps once installed. - Remember the Pi uses the entire PCB copper ground plane in the board as a heatsink too. 
- Most rpi heat sinks have a foam insulator acting as a sticky tape. Remove it and use thermal paste 
- I’ve been using this after, like you said, 2 weeks of full-time silent 3V fan, leading to a sudden increase in noise and worse performance (it essentially broke), and… damn, it cools even better now, it’s more temperature-stable, and it’s absolutely silent, while no extra power consumption is needed. - It is also true that I try to keep HAOS with as little concurrent addons as possible. - The case is really cool once set up, I love how it feels. It’s got a purpose and it’s going for it. Really feels like it was made 1000% for dissipating heat. And it works like magic. 
- Why don’t you try a cpu stress test to meausure the cpu temperature with and without the fan ? I think you should try if you’re quite concerned about this. 
- I used to run a Raspberry Pi 4 in the same case for months at a time and didn’t have issues. I’d say you are fine 
- Argon case comes with software which controls fan speed and turns it off for temperatures below +50°. My RasPi with HA never went above +45°, the fan inside never turned on. I’m using it for two years now. 




