Raspberry Pi 4 Mini Desktop Case – Ice Tower Cooler + Secondary PCB Cooling Fan

This is a case I designed for the Raspberry Pi 4 with the Ice Tower Cooler by 52Pi.

I designed this during the coronavirus quarantine and in some ways influenced by this ongoing experience.

For one, there’s potentially hours of experimentation potential as there are different fan options to test… if you’re stuck at home bored with nothing to and a spare Raspberry Pi and some fans sitting around.

Furthermore, since supply shipments are sketchy, I kept the 3D printer filament usage to a minimum, thinned parts wherever possible, provided opportunities to fabricate some parts out of other household materials (like possibly cardboard for the top and bottom panels which are not structural and otherwise featureless).

This case is intended to be used with the Ice Tower Cooler, but it adds a secondary fan above the USB ports. This secondary fan can be either 30mm x 7mm or 30mm x 10mm. There are both 5v and 3.3v fans in this size available and some fans claim to be capable of doing both. Giving the maker a whole lot of options to play with for hours of experimenting and charting temps.

The second fan is mounted on a funnel which channels air down, around the USB ports and onto the PCB near the RAM chip. There is a grill around the SD card slot for exhausting heated air.

Additionally there is an optional HDMI side panel cutout to make room for a 40mm x 20mm fan on the Ice Tower heatsink itself.

There are also printable top and bottom panels (try printing them in vase mode to minimize material usage). The slots which hold these panels are about 4mm so they are big enough to hold a variety of materials such as cardboard, foamcore, wood, acrylic – whatever the maker has on hand to save precious filament.

I try to avoid support material wherever I can. But the structure part will require support under much of it, the HDMI and the SD side will require a little support support around their ports/SD card socket recess.

I recommend rotating the duct part 30 degrees counterclockwise and putting it’s discharge port flat down on the bed. This will minimize support material requirement. You may need a raft depending on your bed adhesion as this part has little surface area to stick to the bed.

Most of these parts are intended to be printed face down – the bottom layer becoming the outside face. Rotation will be needed for pretty much all parts – sorry about that.

Hardware Required:

14 m3 x 6mm – 8mm screws.

All exterior screw holes are countersunk, but pan head philips or allen cap screws will work fine. The fan duct screw holes are not countersunk, but countersunk screws will work fine.

Otherwise, all the hardware required is what came with the Ice Tower. The stock philips head m2.5 screws and standoffs and heat sink brackets are used to attach the structural component to the Pi board (see pics for proper orientation).

In my own testing I have found the secondary fan to be worth 3-5 degrees (SOC temp) with my Pi 4 4gb overclocked to 2ghz with minimal difference (within the significant digits margin) between a name brand (Orion) 10mm thick fan and a (no name, cheap Amazon) 7mm thick fan. The difference was ~.3 degrees average over 25 fully stressed data points. But your experience may vary – that’s hopefully some of the the fun of this.

For a baseline temp with my pi 4 overclocked to 2ghz in this case I had an average temp under load of 40 degrees. With the secondary 30mm fan it averaged 35. Experimenting with a 40×20 fan on the heatsink and a 30 x 10 fan got temps down to 33 degrees.

Youtube video showing this item in more detail including my thermal testing numbers in greater detail:

https://youtu.be/PcIA3O3OnF8