Our friends over at ETA Prime recently shot an Extreme Cooling video about using the ICE Tower Cooler from Seeed Studio on the NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit. Looky here:
In an earlier article, Jetson Nano – Add a Fan!, we installed a Noctua A4x20 5V PWM fan on our Jetson Nano. What happens if you want a little more, shall we say, bling?
If you throw all the bells and whistles at a cooling solution, you end up with the ICE Tower CPU Cooling Fan from Seeed Studio. There’s copper tubes, a multi-layer aluminum heat sink, RGB lights, all PWM controllable.
While we haven’t experienced any thermal issues with our Jetson Nanos here at JetsonHacks, I will suggest that any thermal issue would be scared away if you mount this fan o’ fun on your Nano.
You can pick one up on Amazon using our affiliate link, or directly from Seeed Studio.
Thermal Performance
Under most conditions, the large heatsink on the Jetson Nano keeps the system running within the design thermal limits. However there may be times when running very GPU intensive loads or when the Jetson is in a very warm environment, that the thermal limits may be reached.
Once the thermal limits are reached, the system software will lower the clock speeds on the CPU and GPU to help reduce the heat being generated. This is called thermal throttling.
If you are wondering about thermal benchmarks for the Jetson Nano and such, there is an excellent article over at Phoronix.com with comprehensive thermal testing: The Thermal Performance Of NVIDIA’s Jetson Nano $99 Developer Board
As discussed in the video, the ICE Tower Cooler helps keep the Nano a few degrees cooler in comparison to a bare heatsink and a more traditional fan solution. For some applications you need extreme cooling. This may be a make or break problem which needs a solution.
However, if you want to impress your friends and confuse your enemies, it’s ok to get the Ice Tower Cooler just for the looks alone.