A few years ago I reviewed the ICE Tower CPU cooling fan for Raspberry Pi 4 which is an oversized heatsink with a cooling fan and some RGB LEDs that obviously does its job at cooling the board, but the main benefit is really its aesthetics.
52Pi has now designed another ICE Tower cooling fan for the Orange Pi 5 SBC, and the new Orange Pi 5B, with the same concept except for its low-profile design.
It’s probably not needed for the Orange Pi 5 which should do fine with a heatsink, but it may help for the Orange Pi 5B due to the extra heat from the WiFi 6 module. A company representative for 52Pi told us that:
I have seen this Orange Pi 5B motherboard posted on your site, there are quite a lot of reviews and discussions, so far after our engineer’s test, this motherboard has quite a lot of heat, so we made a custom ice tower cooler for this motherboard, good cooling effect to keep the motherboard cool even under heavy load
The full kit is comprised of a low-profile “radiator” (heatsink with 5mm copper tubes + fan), two metal brackets for mounting, two thermal pads for the CPU, four M2.5 nuts, six M2.5 screws, eight M2.5 copper standoffs, an acrylic bottom panel, and a screwdriver. This is what the kit looks like before assembly with the Orange Pi 5/5B. There does not seem to be any software to control the RGD LEDs or the fan since it just connects to the 5V and GND pins on the GPIO header.
52Pi did some testing with an Orange Pi 5 running Ubuntu 20.04 under load without cooling and with the ICE Tower cooling fan, and the difference in temperature is about 20 to 27°C, as the temperature dropped from 71 to 76°C to around 45-50°C… The system should be able to run at 75°C without throttling, but the ICE Tower gives it more legroom. They used sysbench stress test according to the wiki.
52Pi is selling the ICE Tower cooling fan for Orange Pi 5 and 5B single board computers on Amazon for $19.99, or you can also find it on the 52Pi’s store for $12.69 plus shipping.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
Support CNX Software! Donate via cryptocurrencies, become a Patron on Patreon, or purchase goods on Amazon or Aliexpress
