How to Stress Test Temperature on Raspberry Pi (Stressberry)

Guides
61

Okay, I’ve been fooling around with my Pi 4/4GB for a few weeks now. Again… (I’ve had it on the bench for a couple of years, since the Pi4 came out). Always wanting more, I found this great site’s tutorial/s on overclocking and this stress-testing page. Great Stuff!!

Anyway - here are a couple of the PNG’s from two tests. Same setup except that the first one was done with the fan running on a fixed 5 Volts, and the more recent one is using a Python PWM script I found online ( HERE.

I have a Geekworm aluminum heatsink and also their SSD mount (w/ 240 GB Kingston) and UPS V 2.1, along with a header breakout board. I’m using a simple MOSFET module to control the fan’s 12 Volts. I did modify the above link’s script a bit, adjusting it’s responses to better suit me. I’m not done with that, but it’s alright for now. The biggest thing, though, is that instead of the 25 Hertz PWM rate in the author’s script, after testing, I made mine 5000 Hertz (5 KiloHertz). The fan is much more responsive.

I am overclocked to 2 MHz, 750 KHz gpu, and overvolted to “0”. It’s 100% reliable, and far faster and more responsive than it has any right to be!

I’m also including a couple of pictures of my (almost always temporary) current setup: a Noctua 92mm 12V fan wrapped in my shroud made of roof flashing aluminum sheet. It’s only 0,5 mm (0.020 in) thick, you can cut it with kitchen shears if that’s all you have, it’s cheap, and you can often pick up scraps for free at home building sites (ask first!).

20220304_RPi4_Stress_test
20220304_RPi4_Stress_test2125×1409 175 KB

***** I live in the country and have satellite Internet, and we’re in the middle of our first Spring thunderstorm, so I’ll have to come back later to upload more pictures.

BDH

2 Likes
62

Hi all
Just ran the stressberry on a Raspberry Pi4 2Gb that is in this case

Ambient temp 16 C (it’s Melbourne :cold_face:)
Raspberry Pi - Max temp 55C, Clock always 1800MHz

mjttest
mjttest2093×1409 176 KB

I like no moving parts !

3 Likes
63

Why there are differences in plot? I am reading comments and some of them looks like this:

e1f9b86393887c006c604bf0efe87d0aaa94f467_2_690x481
e1f9b86393887c006c604bf0efe87d0aaa94f467_2_690x481690×481 16.6 KB

And some of them (mine too) looks this this:

314ef20f5b8af361a896867f1364a851216dffbf_2_690x471
314ef20f5b8af361a896867f1364a851216dffbf_2_690x471690×471 19.6 KB

I like first image more, because of grids and smaller labels. How can I change the way image looks?

64

The instructions are somewhat dated (and not appropriate for current OS or Pi5 which has higher clock speeds).

I installed into a (pre-existing venv) and ran the following on Trixie on Pi5:-

mkdir ~/TemperatureTests
cd ~/TemperatureTests
sudo apt install stress
myenv	# activate venv myenv
pip3 install stressberry --user
pip3 install pandas-stubs
stressberry-run -n "My Test" -d 1800 -i 300 -c 4 mytest.out
stressberry-plot mytest.out -f -d 300 -f -l 1000 2500 -t 30 80 -o mytest.png --not-transparent

Without the Active Cooler the temperature quickly reached 85 ℃ and throttled the speed.
With the Active Cooler the Pi ran at full speed (2400Hz) for the entire test and the temperature was below 65 ℃ (rarely exceeding 60 ℃)

65

Hey there, Ian, thanks for reaching out.

Yeah, the original instructions are now a bit dated for newer Raspberry Pi OS releases and Raspberry Pi 5 hardware. Without a venv you’re going to have a tough time installing anything with pip. I’ll pass this along to our creative team and see if we can’t a more modern version of the guide.

Thank you for including your modified instructions. They’re a very useful addition for anyone following the guide on current hardware.