Making the Radxa X4 Even Cooler
Back when I reviewed the Radxa X4, I went to some trouble to go over its thermal characteristics and how well that massive heatsink worked.
At the time, I resorted to using my own thermal pad to get the best possible contact between the CPU and the heatsink, but apparently that was not enough, because the board still ran a bit hot under load.
This weekend I decided to do something about that–I took one of the SSD copper heatsinks I had lying around, verified that it was thin enough (it was exactly 1mm), cut it to match the heatsink contact plate, and applied some thermal paste:
To verify that this was not a fluke, I ran the same load test I had used in my original review, and the temperatures peaked at 48°C, staying well below the 96°C I got last time:
Even better, the board had a steadier CPU boost to 3GHz at the start, and held up nicely at 2.5GHz for the duration of the test, without the slight throttling I had observed before:
