Hi I am new to all this and just ordered 2 off AML-S905X-CC (Le Potato)

[EtheAv8r]

I plan to use them for Pi-Hole DNS servers, I had been waiting for ages for Raspberry Pi stock to come back in, and finally gave up. After a deal of investigation, I though that the Libre AML-S905X-CC (Le Potato) was a great alternative, so ordered 2 plus 2 heatsinks, 2 cases and power supplies.

If I ask stupid questions, please be gentle with me as I am in my 70’s and not a hot shot programmer, but willing to learn.

I am really surprised that there seems to be no UK dealers, so I had to order from the USA, and pay silly postage charges, but I am sure it will be worth it.

[angus]

Hi! As a fellow non-hot-shot-programmer I’ll tell you that these boards have a bit of a learning curve, but if you’re persistent and can run a search engine, you should be able to get it to do most things.

I’ve never done anything with Pi-Hole, but the one thing I think you should know in advance is they do run hot. You’ll probably be OK with the heatsinks, since I think Pi-Hole is headless, but if you find them climbing above 60℃ I recommend a small fan.

Le Potato - Long Term Process Heat

Hello fellow builders and tinkerers. tldr; On Le Potato, if your project requires a long-running 25% or higher CPU using process you will need to take cooling into consideration. By default, when the CPU hits 60 the board drops to 100MHz core speed. This occurs very quickly (less than 5 minutes) if you have a process which is running on the cpu. For me that is direwolf, which processes audio to data and uses about 15% of a core at max frequency. So, 15% usage of one core at full clock speed…

Have fun!

[EtheAv8r]

Thanks for the heads-up. The cases I have ordered have cooling fans, and PiHole is a very light-weight DNS server so hopefully it will not be a problem.

[librecomputer]

You can follow the standard Pi-hole installer and it should work. There’s not anything special that is needed.

[EtheAv8r]

Temperatures… following advice regarding potential high temperatures on the AML-S905X-CC I did some testing with one set up with the 2022-09-22-raspbian-bullseye-arm64-lite+aml-s905x-cc.img.xz image. The unit was running as a Pi-Hole DNS server (headless with no monitor, keyboard or mouse) for several hours in each configuration before I recorded the temperatures:

Bare board on its own in the open = 46°C
Installed the Libre Blue heatsink on bare board = 34°C
Installed the heatsinked board in a case with the fan off = 36°C
With fan running off 5v = 27°C
With fan running off 3.3v = 34°C

Notes:
46°C is also the same as the original RPi 3B running Pi-Hole inside a simple shell case, no heatsinks.

I was somewhat sceptical about the effectiveness of the Libre Blue Heatsink with its thick, spongy thermal pad, but it indeed proved very effective!

The little fan adds significantly to the cooling effectiveness, with the heatsink and fan at 5v there is almost 20°C temperature drop! However it is far better at cooling on 5v than 3.3v where it is not bosting the cooling by any significant margin.