Stuart Henderson [s...@spacehopper.org] wrote: > >>> Heat: The APUs have an innovative design where the CPU heat sink > >>> is coupled to the case. Since this is typically assembled by the > >>> customer, a lot of attention is drawn to it and people obsess over > >>> the CPU temperature. It's a nonissue. > > I've got hold of an APU2C2 now. Agreed - but most of the temperature > comments where about APU1 where this was not the case, especially with > the version of OpenBSD that was around when the hardware first became > available they really were uncomfortably warm. With the 2C2 I'm now > happy to use it pretty much anywhere I'd use an ALIX.
The APU2 case is slightly cooler. My experience is that the heatsink pad failed on some units, it became almost brittle. The affected units would crash every few days... I took apart some 20 initially assembled units with the heatsink pads, and found some pads brittle, others were perfect. I just replaced the heatsink pads on all of my APUs (probably 50 by now) with heatsink paste and they all work perfectly, no crashing ever. Some serve DNS and DHCP to networks with tens of thousands of devices, some act as redundant routers, some just collect information via GPIO pins. The units with low temps and heatsink pads got hotter with the paste, but the units with bad heatsink pads got cooler with the paste. It may seem like obsession, but I just want them to be stable :) The APU1 is fine even in a high temp environment as long as the heatsink material is working properly. (PC Engines does not endorse replacing the heatsink pad with paste.) Chris
