Looking for the best heat sink for your Raspberry Pi 3? Check out this nice and tall 15x15x15mm Heat Sink!
This heat sink is made from high quality aluminum and will work perfectly with any Raspberry Pi but is best paired with a Raspberry Pi 3 since it can run a little hot. It comes with thermal adhesive already applied to the back making installation super easy. Clean the surface of the chip of any dust or grease then peel off the protective film and press the heat sink firmly onto the chip. You can use this heatsink with any of our injection molded Adafruit Pi Enclosures, but it may not work with other enclosures and most HATs will not fit on top with the heat sink installed.
We don’t have formal specs for this heat sink, but when we ran ‘stress -c 4’ on the Pi 3 to run all 4 CPUs, a heat-sink-less Pi quickly dropped down to 0.96 GHz to maintain thermal equilibrium. With this heat sink installed, it could run at 1.16GHz (so, 20% higher performance)
Note that you do not need a heatsink for the Pi 3, it will automatically adjust its speed to avoid overheating! It can also, of course, be used for other processors and chips.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
