Reduce EON noise level

ARGON EON DISCUSSION
1

Hi,

I am not sure, how other users think about weak points of the EON case. For me the real bad point is noise because of the fan or let’s better say because of the air flow. THe fan as such seems to be rather calm…

I have found a way that works quite OK for me, how to get the noise level down by reducing the clock speed of the CPU. I was not aware that Raspberry foundation has released some update in history, which allows the CPU to work up to 1.8GHz, which is called “arm_boost”. So i have changed the value in /boot/config.txt from 1 to 0.
For me this results in 3 - 5 degrees less heat and the fan almost never spins up. In history this behaviour was different and i had the fan running very frequently, even while only transferring some files with scp.

So what i did, was editing: /boot/config.txt
Close to the end there is a section:

[pi4]
# Run as fast as firmware / board allows
arm_boost=0

I changed arm_boots to 0 instead of 1 and of course you have to reboot after that change. Please be aware: If you mess up with that file, your PI might not boot anymore, so be careful!

Maybe this help the one or other to get the EON NAS a bit more silent.
To understand my perfomance need: I am using the 8GB RAM version and i am running a private cloud SW called Nextcloud via docker and a fileserver, utilizing NFS on my EON.

Cheers
Maximilian

Just to add this: Before and after the change you can check the clock speed of the CPU, how often it runs with max speed. Since the change it goes only up to 1.5 GHz, see command:
:~ $ sudo cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/stats/time_in_state

> 600000 1414985
> 700000 33365
> 800000 10257
> 900000 5090
> 1000000 3318
> 1100000 0
> 1200000 0
> 1300000 0
> 1400000 0
> 1500000 938942
2

Did you try changing the cpufreq config to limit the upper frequency of your CPU?

Normaly the ondemand profile should keep cpu as low as possible but you can limit the upper boundary

3

Hi, i checked with the cat command ($ sudo cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/stats/time_in_state) before i modified the boost option and could see, that the CPU would run roughly 40% of the times with 1.8 GHz and 60% with 0.6 GHz. It was very similar like now, just the max frequency was 1.8 GHz instead of 1.5 GHz now. In my case the heat reduction was significant.
I hope this answers your question.