Overheating in Raspberry Pi 3

Support & Help Requests Raspberry Pi
#1

Anyone having overheating issues with the Raspberry Pi 3? Mine is heating up greatly, hot enough to burn skin and destroy data on the micro sdcard and any data in the USB(and yes I have heat sinks on it). It seems to do fine if I’m using OMXplayer or youtube-dl. The Ubuntu MATE runs really well on it, boots up faster than any of my other computers, desktops, laptops or phones.
The biggest heat increase is while watching video directly from youtube in the browser. Streaming video is apparently causing a strain that is causing extreme amounts of heat. I’m hoping that there is a software solution to this, but I’m starting to think this is in the hardware decoding for streaming video.
I’m trying to gather as much information as I can(hopefully I’ll be able to understand the info I gather).

Even if you have no solutions, please let me know if anyone else is having this problem. I do want to know if it’s just me or if there are others out there. I haven’t seen anything about it on the Raspberry Pi forums, although there are some murmurs about it out there.

To the Ubuntu MATE team, I started with Ubuntu MATE on my Raspi3, then put it on my Raspi2. Liked it so much I put it on both my laptops, and now I’ve put it on my gaming computer. I now have only this OS on all my machines. If I can find a way to get it on my phone and tablet, they will be next.
Thanks and keep up the great work. I am loving it.

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#2

Check the Raspi forum:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=138193

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#3

Thanks wolfman, I had read that earlier, and of course the only action to take is ‘get a heat sink’, which I already have, and it still is getting hot enough to destroy data. I think this is still a new issue, so there isn’t a whole lot of info yet. It appears to be hit and miss on getting a Pi3 that will heat up like this. Some are only getting up to 60Celcius, while others are hovering around 82Celcius, and then there are ones like mine that are getting 100-105Celcius. 85Celcius is supposed to be the throttle and 125Celcius is the max rating before failure. Of course, that doesn’t account for the data destruction shutting down the whole thing first.

I’ve had to install UbuntuMATE twice, due to the data being destroyed by heat. That’s just not acceptable. If it ends up that there are just a few faulty Pi3 out there, I’m fine with that, and I’ll probably buy a replacement for $35. But if not, I’m getting another Pi2, until they sort it out.

Right now, if anyone asked me, I’d have to suggest getting the Pi2, for now, and waiting to get the Pi3.
The Pi3 is much faster, but not so fast that it is capable of more tasks. So yes, it is faster, but can’t necessarily use that speed to perform functions that the Pi2 can’t.

I really hate to speak ill of Raspberry Pi, they gave us such awesome, affordable tech. They produced many more of the Pi3, and they were selling before they were on the market. I hope that didn’t rush them to put out a product before it was ready.
Even with this Pi3 being a problem, I will still be a Pi customer. If the Pi3 ends up a bust, I will buy another Pi2(since my friend borrowed my Pi2, and won’t give it back). If they fix the Pi3, I’ll buy another one(and maybe another two).

#4

Hi LBM,

I know nothing about the Raspberry Pi devices, I do have a Matricom streaming box (Android, XBMC/Kodi) and that isn’t as good as other models, you might just have had some bad luck when you made your purchase choice or the units are just not ripe yet, I don’t know if that really is the case though!. :frowning:

#5

I’ve had my new, cased, raspberry pi3 running MATE 15.10 on permanently for the last +48hrs and it’s only just very slightly warm to the touch. During that time I’ve had intensive periods hammering a large database LibreOffice application testing the software. No problems & no overheating. Very pleased with 15.10. Did a second installation on a fast 16GB ScanDisk Extreme - everything run much quicker than my original installation on a class 4 8GB SD.

You might have had the bad luck to get a Friday-afternoon made pi … just a thought.

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#6

I haven’t had much of a problem with just data crunching, but when streaming video in a browser, it overheats. In particular, with Youtube when using a web browser.
It does fine when watching video with OMXplayer, and fine when using youtube-dl to download.
I’m guessing that it has got to do with video conversion, while keeping the browser going, is creating the heating problem.
If you could, would you be willing to check this on yours and see if Youtube video is the issue?

#7

I have/had the same problem with 15.10 and Firefox playing Youtube videos when i first tested, the CPU would reach temps near 80°C. Is it possible that Firefox decodes Youtube video on CPU?

I tested earlier on Raspbian with their Pi optimized web browser, and instead of the video playing using a lot of the CPU etc, it only uses a few % and the temp stays low… it doesn’t get much more hotter than idle in this case.

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#8

Been running my PI continuously for the last +2hrs streaming video from Youtube as requested it’s warmed up but is nowhere near hot. (Have my jam thermometer resting on top of the case and it’s yet to reach 40C.) Will leave it on till and let you know if it gets any hotter
Best regards
Jay

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#9

Thanks to both JayArr and wytnoize. This is the type of info I’m looking for. It’s too early to tell yet, but it looks like there may be a bad production run of RasPi3 that are having overheating problems. Of course there are always a few faulty in any run.

To make sure what is happening takes a lot of time, and getting several units running the same software, performing the same functions and trying to duplicate the problem(yay scientific method), but this gives us a starting point.

So at the moment we’ve got two out of three heating up, and one out of three heating to failure. I’ll keep looking for more about this and will probably order another pi3 and see if it has the same problem. Can’t have too many toys!
Appreciate you guys taking the time to respond.

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#10

I’m coming around to this being a Firefox issue. Firefox is using the CPU only to process everything. If its possible for Firefox to use the GPU then I think there will no longer be any overheating.

From what I’ve gathered, between Firefox and HTML5, even with settings to allow hardware acceleration, most of the video streaming is still running through the CPU. This would explain why I’m only having problems when watching Youtube through the web browser. When I checked the system monitor, all 4 cpu are running 60-70% while playing video with Firefox. It hovers around 30% on one cpu when using omxplayer, just for a comparison.

I also tried out epiphany web browser, it also was causing extra heat, and system monitor showed similar usage on the CPU. So, if there are any guesses out there to help this, we’d love to hear them. I’ll be checking the Firefox pages to see if there’s any info there.

So as wytnoize mentioned, Raspian’s web browser may be the solution here.

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#11

I installed Midori, and found it using much lower CPU percentages, around 10%, versus 30%-40%. Youtube still causes overheating, though it takes a little longer, not an instantaneous firestarter like Firefox. Looks like Midori is what I’ll be using for now. I’ll still be downloading through youtube-dl, or VLC to stream URLs.

I’ll keep an eye out for any better browsers.

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#12

Using a Pi3 in a molded plastic case and no heat sink, my temps seldom get past the mid 50’s C with firefox running. I have not done much with videos…on a capped ISP here so I block flash content. My idling power consumption is about 3.5 watts with firefox running but nothing going on. No way I would trade ff for midori…too many trade-offs, as with epiphany. Ff is a major reason for running u-mate for me. I do use a 30 G SSD for root for durability reasons but I have not encountered any corruption of the uSD card either.

#13

Wow, it does get quite a bit hotter, Only a few times Ive seen the thermal warning icon appear on a Pi 2, got heatsinks, OC’ed and OV the thing never got past 78C. Was running mandelbulber on it to make a wallpaper, render time ~16 minutes, actually saw it blinking very bright orange and flickering to RED once so often

#14

Just finished compiling something, i have copper heatsink on it, it went up to 65°C out of curiosity I compressed some video with x264… ye it goes up to 68°C but hovers there, if you have thermal issues… get a copper Heatsink that helps a lot. (As far as my tests went, which are based on the thermal sensor inside the Pi, no thermal camera or external thermometer)

#15

Can you tell me where you got your heatsinks? Are they specific to the pi’s SoC or just happen to be the right size

#16

Nothing specific I assume, I just searched “Raspberry pi heatsink” on eBay and Amazon and looked for copper ones, I bought them, they came with some sticky tape, but i used a tiny little blob of actual thermal paste, sure it can fall off, but I never move my Pi so it’s fine. The heatsink is larger than the chip so you gotta be careful it doesn’t touch any circuits, but due to the chip being offset that’s not a big issue. So all works out nicely.

#17

Got my heatsinks from canakit.
They sell the pi3 kit with correct power supply and heatsinks with a case.
Altogether it comes out around $60-$80US.

#18

As always your results may vary. I add this because I am actually drawing power off the Pi3 board itself. Please make sure if your going to reproduce what I am doing, you understand the GPIO header and understand what current is :smiley:

I got real worried about heat issues and running the chip so hot… Money is tight, but I do have lots of stuff in my boneyard… Found an chipset sink on an old dead board… Pried it off and attached it to SoC via some high quality thermal paste. Still wasn’t good enough so I grabbed the 12V 0.12A CPU cooler, did the math, attached it to the GPIO’s +5V and ground and now I am sporting low use load like this website your on temps under 42C. Decided to compile mandelbulber and give it a test. During compile, temps never went over 67C. All of this being run on a 2A PSU from the Pi2. Bluetooth and wifi are off, but I am running the analog audio out to a pair of speakers to play some music via cmus

#19

Hey LBM,

Thanks for this thread. I know it’s older, but I found it very useful. Although I’m currently running Raspbian on my Pi3 B, I was encountering the exact same issue. Streaming Youtube in a webpage was giving my Pi hot flashes. I thought it might have been the Pi itself, but the ONLY time it did it was running a webpage that had a YouTube playlist streaming in it. Kodi wasn’t an issue, and I never encountered it when gaming. It was just the stream. It would take less than a minute to get the yellow flag in the corner, and my processor would be at 80% or better and at 80c. I had tried Chromium and Iceweasel and they both did the same thing (albeit Chromium seemed to do it faster). I had also tried the ultra lightweight kweb, but it completely locked up my Pi. It had done it while I was away, so I’m not certain if it locked because of heat or something else. In any case, the symptoms are the same and I am searching for a solution. I would love to hear if you found anything. I’m also going to take a deeper look at uMate. I’m intrigued now.

Thanks all,

Jason

#20

I haven’t heard of this myself but i just saw someone mentioning this in another thread:

By the way raspberry pi foundation is working on a Hardware video acceleration decoding for chromium too

Although, if you use Raspbian, i guess the better solution for now would be to use their Epiphany based browser as it supports hardware accelerated video decoding.
: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/web-browser-released/