Why?

First off do not try this at home – it may damage your Pi or cause things in your freezer to thaw if the door is left ajar in anyway. This is a joke experiment, do not replicate! I take no responsibility for damaged Pis.

Anyway – it’s summer time at the moment and I just got my new Raspberry Pi through with a case from Pimoroni – and it looks so nice:

IMG_3495

But even with the big new heat sink on it still gets pretty toasty – especially around summertime.

Last year I did an experiment with using cooking oil to cool a Pi – while not exactly practical it certainly did the job in cooling the Pi down a good 22 degrees or so compared to passive air while running Quake 3.

So this year I thought about how I could one up myself with an even more ridiculous experiment – putting the Pi in a freezer!

What I’m using:

How?

For this experiment I’m going to:

Run the Pi on air idle and get the temperature results – using the temperature script from my Oil-Cooled Raspberry Pi project.

Oil-Cooled Raspberry Pi Run 4 instances of the Pi calculation script from my Raspberry Pi: Old vs. New post alongside GLXGears for 30 mins and get the temperature results.

Raspberry Pi: Old vs. New post GLXGears Put the Pi in my freezer and get the temperature on idle.

Run the above tests again for 30 minutes and see get the temperature results.

And here’s the freezer that will being doing its best to cool the Pi:

High-tech.

I put the Pi in the quick-freeze department:

Quick freeze.

Results

As in the video – you can see it cut the under-load temps down by about 30 degrees; which is pretty decent; however not really worth the effort.

For comparison, my Oil Cooled project dropped the load temps by about 22 degrees; so not the greatest improvement.

Here’s the results from the freezer vs air:

Conclusion

As I say; this is more of a joke experiment just to see how the temperatures would drop in the freezer – it’s not meant to be a practical cooling solution. So again, don’t try this, especially not with a brand new Pi!

While the cooling results were pretty impressive, dropping the load temps to below the air idle temps; it wouldn’t be possible to have this running all the time.

It does, however, make me think about those super sub-zero coolers I’ve seen people use on desktop PC’s when overclocking – like this:

And makes me wonder; just how cool could you get a Pi?

Stay cool and see you next time…