Clip-on magnetic phone cooler on the back shell
A cheap magnetic gaming-phone cooler clipped to the aluminium back pulls heat out of the whole console when a CM5 is working hard.
What it takes
- Plug & play
- Purchase required
Difficulty 1 of 3 — easy.
Details
Wander_Menezes lives in a hot climate and found that a clip-on smartphone cooler — a small Peltier-and-fan unit that grips a metal sticker — keeps a CM5 from throttling by using the aluminium body as a heat spreader. It draws power and adds bulk, but it needs no disassembly and comes off in a second.
Reported drop of up to 23 °C in short order. The thread ends with a plea to ClockworkPi for a proper Peltier accessory.
Links
Open at Forum threadRelated mods
Two layers of 0.5 mm thermal pad and a small aluminium heatsink on the CM5 SoC, held with thermal tape — about 10 °C cooler under load.
A CM4 socket protection adapter lifts the CM5 so a 0.5 mm pad reaches the back shell instead of the thick stock pad.
Replace the ~4 mm stock pad, which is sized for the A-06, with a thinner high-quality pad or paste that matches the real CM4/CM5 gap.
The adapter board's PWM fan header runs a Raspberry Pi, Waveshare or EDATEC CM5 cooler; printed back covers make the room.
hack2you's machined cooling pad for the compute module, sold on Tindie alongside the trackpad keyboard and NVMe modules.
A one-off machined metal backplate with a real heat path to the CM5, floated as a possible group buy at around $250.