Reddit reviews GDSTIME Aluminum Heatsink for Computer Northbridge Cooler Cooling

This heatsink: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ZRDRX8M/
With this fan: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NEMGCIA/

If you want to silence your xu4, [this chipset heatsink from amazon](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ZRDRX8M?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00
) fits perfectly.

My xu4 with it: http://imgur.com/HejVtkY

I got one for christmas and am trying to cool it off, too.
I got a heatsync: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ZRDRX8M
And Noctula Fan: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00NEMGCIA

But with the thermal pad, it still shoots up to ~96 degrees under full load. It must be the thermal pad because the heatsync stays totally cool with the fan running (it does warm up without the fan).

I wonder if we could put metal shims on top of the two cpu dies to lift the heatsync away from the rest of the surface mount components and then use proper thermal paste to bind them with the heatsync. I'll have to do some research into this... :) Let me know if you guys come up with any other ideas... !

I don't think you need shims. All the cores are in the large die. My stock heatsink had plastic over the thermal pad which should have been removed. I discovered it while in the process of replacing the heatsink so i didn't do any testing with it removed.

I've attached this heatsink with thermal paste and a noctua fan and have had a decent improvement in temps.

Using this as a benchmark, my stock times in time2throttle were:

2 instances- 42.4 s

3 - 6.9

4 - 2.3

After the upgrade the times were:

2 - never hit

3 - 46

4 - 5

Suffice to say, I believe the heatsink is making adequate contact without any shimming.

note: time2throttle only runs properly in ubuntu.

I haven't used one myself. However I can give you some advice on it if you choose to go with it. The stock fan on it is not the best, I would highly recommend getting a generic universal northbridge/chipset heat sink and grab a 5V fan to go with it.

Buy the eMMC card for it. Make sure you get the one that's for the XU4 as the eMMC cards for the C2 uses a newer standard that is not backwards compatible. Having the eMMC chip makes such a difference compared to using a microSD card.

You'll likely want to run Armbian with the mainline Xenial install. iirc, the Armbian website was hosted from an XU4 for quite a while, at least until it couldn't adequately handle the increased popularity as more and more boards became supported.

I'm not sure what your plans are for storage, but if the drives are currently NTFS formatted you're going to want to change that. You will take a significant performance hit for leaving them NTFS.