I’m using the R4 without the official case, because I will be mounting the board vertically in a multi-media cabinet (basically a power distribution cabinet with venting holes in the bottom and top of the door and metal plates with holes to mount things).
Now I’m seeing relatively high temperatures on the wifi chips, around 70C, and would like to cool them better.
There are 4 additional screw holes on the board that are not used for mounting. Are those intended for a heatsink or are those just randomly there for production or testing or whatever?
I was thinking about putting one big heatsink on them, but would need to fasten it with screws somehow, because it would be quite heavy and gravity would pull it off the thermal pads.
Has anyone else tried to do this and could share their experience with me?
Edit: So basically, a heatsink like this that covers all chips, with cutouts for the two mounting screws so don’t are blocked.
I had the same idea as yours to use a breaker box. If it has standard width of 12 DIN modules, the official case will fit inside just fine. Otherwise I’d use the perforated plate as a heatsink if I was going to mount the router to it directly. Sure, it’s not as thermally conductive as aluminum, but it’s huge and the BE14 doesn’t run very hot anyways. Good thermal pads of the appropriate thickness are key here.
Thanks, but as I said, I’m going to use the board without the case.
This is how my perforated plate looks like. The box comes with four of those instead of one big one like on your case. Since the holes of the R4 didn’t match those of the plate, I had to make an “adapter”.
Now I got around 3cm of space on both sides to fit bigger heatsinks.
I remember someone on this forum mentioning that you can order heatsinks from vendors on Aliexpress custom-made to the specified dimensions and mounting holes placement.
I ended up making a few mods to the case so I could use copper heat-sinks on the BE14 card… Its a little rough but its made a huge difference with the temps.
Wow, I’m quite impressed that your wifi chips are only at 48°C while in use.
Mine are idling at 68°C even though I’m not even using a case for the R4. And I upgraded the small heatsinks on each chip to one big 50x50x20mm across all of them.
Maybe there has been an update to the firmware that reduces power usage while idle, or my thermal pads are very bad.
I’m guessing but is yours passive cooling? My box sits on top of a cheap Aliexress router cooler which helps a lot with bring those temps down. I live in the sub troppics so when it comes to cooling I go a bit OTT. I used SSY thermal pads 0.5mm & 1.0mm on the cpu & chips and 0.2mm Hoaoh thermal tape on the copper heatsinks on the BE14 chips. The cpu cooler is a 1U copper server cooler which the mount holes lined up perfectly with the boards mount holes, no mods needed.
I just got mine and wanted to ask the same question, though my reason is that I 3d printed the case, what do you think is the correct way to put the heatsink at the bottom? Put there just small metal and a small fan?
thats really nice! do you have any idea if that luci plugin can become part of the official luci distro? I am a bit afraid to install stuff on my router when i dont know the person :>
i asked in luci/openwrt and there is already official support. so for anyone that does not want to install 3rd party stuff outside of official openwrt, install luci-app-statistics, collectd-mod-thermal, lm-sensors, collectd-mod-sensors - then go to luci → statistics → setup, configure them to show all information you’d like and voila, they are listed in the statistics tab
It still feels like we are not using enough power management facilities in the drivers or the hardware does not support those.
The wifi chips use 10W+ while idle. That seems far too much if they are well, idle. I hope this is something that can be done using firmware updates and is not an issue with the first generation wifi 7 itself.
Same for the rest of the system. I have seen messages in dmesg telling me that usb low power mode is not enabled, for example.
I also manually set the CPU governor to on-demand, so the CPU clocks at 800Mhz while idle.
Still I hope there is more to be done to require less cooling in the end.
