Raspberry pi best heatsink comparison benchmark

raspberry_pi_3_heatsinks

Raspberry Pi manufacturer has stated that you don’t need heatsink for the normal operation of the Raspberry Pi device, however overclocked or heavily stressed devices will benefit from heatsink installation.
I decided to compare available heatsinks on the market and have found the best heatsink for Raspberry Pi 3.

First tested heatsink is small – 14x14x6mm, priced 1$ on Ebay
It has an adhesive layer for mounting on CPU.

raspberry_pi_small_heatsink

Second heatsink – is larger 50x25x10mm, also priced 1$

raspberry_pi_large_heatsink

Mounting was done with Arctic Silver thermal compound and super-glue 🙂 Thermal compound was applied to the center and glue – to the corners of the chip.
Please note that this will be a permanent solution, and you will not be able to remove the heatsink.

For loading the CPU I used stress software (apt-get install stress).
Only 1 core of Raspberry Pi 3 was loaded – frequencies: arm_freq=1290 core_freq=430

Here are the temperature graphs:

raspberry_pi_temperature_heatsink

Red line – no heatsink.
Blue – small heatsink 14Ñ…14
Green – large heatsink 50Ñ…25

For a price of 1$ you can greatly improve temperature of Raspberry Pi 3 – by 8 degrees in idle state and by 13 degrees under moderate load.