Just assembled the Eon today. Noticed the thermal pads are about 1.0mm thickness. With the RPi installed, the CPU wasn’t even touching the pad on the heatsink. That’ll lead to increased CPU temps and more fan noise, which seems like what a lot of people here complain about. I switched the pads out with 2.0mm thermal grizzly minus 8’s. CPU runs around upper 30’s while streaming movies. Fan never turns on. Silent NAS. Check you pads.
Exactly.
I had the same problem when I purchased the EON last year.
At the time I disassembled everything again and placed 2 thermal pads one above the other of 1mm (total 2mm) to fill the space in the CPU and RAM, and the passive heatsink.(box)
In my case I have 4x 2.5’ SSD inside.
Using 4 spacers of 20mm I was able to lower the fan from the top. The airflow output is maintained, but the noise is substantially reduced.
For those using a 3.5’ HDD, this change cannot be made.
After this change, it is very rare for the fan to work as the temperature is between 30 and 42ºC, depending on the ambient temperature, and when it works the noise is not so aggressive.
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This is one reason that I prefer to use thermal paste, my latest favorite brand is Maxtor Thermal Paste before this brand was K5 Pro. Both are available in Amazon.
I use it on pi4b main board and all 9x m.2 NGFFs I have installed in my Argon EON
Can confirm the importance of this with some crude numbers.
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When I received my Argon Eon first I used the pads that came with it. They weren’t closing the gaps between the heatsinks & cpu/ram and I reckon I got practically zero cooling effect from the heatsinks that way. My idle cpu temp with a PI4B/4GB running OMV 6.4.x was in the high forties then, say 46 to 48 degrees.
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Then I replaced those pads with 1mm thermal pads which I had to layer to 3mm in total to finally close the gap. I was reading this layering isn’t ideal, but wanted to see of there was an improvement. And there was, idle temp went down to between say 38 to 41.
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Lastly I ordered a small sheet of 3mm thermal pads and replaced the 3 * 1mm layers with a single 3mm pad. This brought another improvement, same idle scenario is now down to between 33 and maybe 35.
So overall the difference between no heatsink effect and proper thermal padding was roughly 15 celsius. Certainly worth doing this right.
I had this issue when setting up my pi4 in the eon case. I noticed the pi board was slightly bending along the length of the board. I decided to remove and re-seat the board again and got perfect contact with included thermal pads. Like above I now get 38-41 degrees Celsius. I’ve yet to replace the included fan and 3d print side covers suggested in other posts on here. Hope this information helps for some.