Is there a provision for a fan in the Reform?
I don’t mean a fan running at full pelt all the time, or turned on manually with a janky switch, but something that throttles up when the temperature rises.
I encoded videos for a couple of hours earlier and the keyboard was so toasty it was almost impossible to type on.
AFAIK the reform was never designed with active cooling in mind.
That said, I think it is absolutely possible. I drilled some holes in the bottom plate a while back in the hope that this might improve things. Although I’ve never actually measured whether it does.
A while back, I purchased a pair of these fans here. They are well documented and easy to get (at least they were a couple of months back).
Mechanically it fits in above the SSD. I even drew up a braked to hold it in place and did a test print.
If I understand correctly, motherboard 3.0 will have an additional I2C header that is connected to the CPU. I purchased some I2C PWM controllers to control the fan.
Now I’m waiting for some more motivation to start testing the PWM controller and, of course, for the motherboard 3.0 to appear in the shop.
Interesting. I did not have issues with temperature on normal usage, but I the heaviest load I have is compilation, which is mainly shorts bursts of high cpu for a few minutes. It reaches 70C or so and goes down to 60C shortly after. Under normal operation mine is always in the 60C -/+ 2C range. I never seen it reaching more than ~73C, not even with heavy loads and I never felt like anything was being throttled.
Did you check what temperature your CPU reaches? Just curious if what you are seeing is expected or maybe there could be something else at play. It would be gnarly if you go down the route of adding a fan and maybe there were something wrong with the thermal pad or the cpu module itself.
Dumb idea that just came to me, If you plan to leave the computer on its own doing stuff for a couple hours, would a cooling pad help?
That’s what I gathered. I kind of wanted to avoid flipping a switch when doing something CPU-intensive, but I have a feeling this might just be the simplest, no-nonsense thing to install in the machine. A bit Fred Flintstone though 
I did not. But the keyboard was hot enough to be uncomfortable, and the PLA spacer I installed to push the bottom plate a couple millimeters down got somewhat soft next to the compute module’s heatsink. So definitely more than 65C.
Here is my current set-up for that.
First, as mentioned, I drilled a bunch of holes in the bottom plate.
Then I built this stand out of Lego. It has a 200mm fan integrated. I am running the fan off USB, so just 5V instead of the 12V it is supposed to have. That way it is nice and quiet.
The laptop fits snuggly onto the stand.
But I have the impression it’s better if some air passes over the back of the laptop’s body. So more often than not, I run the setup like this:
This is fabulously ghetto. I love it
Okay, in fairness, I thought of drilling through the plexiglass plate (presumably with the thing on the lathe so the drilling pattern looks somewhat regular. But I’ve drilled through that stuff enough to know that I’ll almost certainly end up chipping the exit side around a few holes.
So at some point, I think I’ll just replace it with a 3D-printed plate, that will include my spacer, and a socket to install a nice, large, quiet low-profile fan with a totally-independent thermostat circuit.
That should be enough to make the laptop cooler to the touch when I stresss the CPU, without requiring a driver or BIOS support - or whatever passes for a BIOS in the RK3588 module. Because after all, I’m just complaining that it felt too hot: it’s not like the machine crashed or became unstable or anything…
But I haven’t done it yet because, well, I kind of like the transparent bottom, for no particular reason. Silly eh?
I received my classic Reform with RK3588 today, it uses the new, smaller “RCORE” heatsink.
When compiling a bigger C/C++ project with all cores under heavy load for minutes the bigger cores reach up to 80°C (room is at 26° at the moment).
It is not throttling and over all 80°C is still fine for this kind of chips, but i’d prefer a few degrees less.
I’m hesitant to active cooling, will start with some holes in the bottom plate to increase air circulation.
My Snapdragon Elite reaches 95 degrees. 80 degrees is no issue for a cpu.
FWIW, you’ll likely need more than holes in the bottom plate to get any air circulation at all.
today i compiled the linux kernel on my RK3588 Reform Classic - the device was connected to on 65W USB-C power supply all the time and the battery status reported that is was continouosly charging at ~0.8A.
the cpu cores max out at 85°C, but the bigger A76 cores will not reach their max frequency after some time:
I assume its either thermal throttling or the TDP doesn’t allow a sustained full load.
According to Rockchip RK3588 Datasheet (p30) that sounds about right:
RK3588 Datasheet Rev 1.7
Parameters Symbol Min Typ Max Unit
Ambient Operating Temperature TA -20 NA 85 ℃