Testing Raspberry Pi Cases with Stressberry & iPerf

The enclosure you choose for your Raspberry Pi can really affect its performance – for better or worse. Today I’ll evaluate six cases for the Raspberry Pi 4 using Stressberry and iPerf.

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A Raspberry Pi case is more than just a box. The choice of an enclosure can affect the heat dissipation, WiFi and Bluetooth performance, and access to the GPIO and other connectors. In some situations, the case can make the performance better, but sometimes it can make things worse.

Today in the workshop I’ll show you how to use two utilities, Stressberry and iPerf, to test a Raspberry Pi and evaluate its performance.

Stressberry, as its name might imply, will perform a stress-test on the Raspberry Pi. It’s a Python program and I’ll show you how to install it, how to run it and how to produce an easy to interpret graph of the thermal performance of your Raspberry Pi.

iPerf is a network diagnostic utility that can be used on virtually any computer. I’ll show you how to set up both an iPerf server and a client on the Raspberry Pi to evaluate network performance.

We’ll use these utilities on a “naked” Raspberry Pi to get some base readings, then I’ll assemble and test six enclosures to see how they affect the readings.

The cases I’m evaluating are as follows:

The “official” Raspberry Pi Case.
The Pimoroni Heatsink Case
The GeeekPi ABS Case
The Eleduino Aluminum Case
The Smraza Pi 4 Acrylic Case
The Argon 1 Case

Some of the results may even surprise you, and one case had a pretty serious flaw. Good things to know if you’re choosing an enclosure for your Raspberry Pi.

Here is the Table of Contents for today’s video:

Raspberry Pi Case Requirements – 2:23
Base Test Setup – 7:25
Installing & Using Stressberry – 10:01
Installing & Using iPerf and iwlan – 18:39
Base Test Results – 27:02
Official Raspberry Pi Case Results – 28:08
Pimoroni Heatsink Case Results – 29:04
GeeekPi ABS Case Results – 31:35
Eleduino Aluminum Case Results – 33:28
Smraza Pi 4 Case Results – 35:01
Argon 1 Case Results – 37:01
Results Summary – 40:05
Additional Thoughts – 42:49

Obviously, there are hundreds of other cases on the market, these six represent a good selection of common enclosure designs. Using Stressberry and iPerf you’ll be able to check out your own Raspberry Pi cases and see how they stack up.

While I’m restricting these tests to the Raspberry Pi 4 the software and testing methodology I’m using would apply to any model of the Raspberry Pi.

I hope you find this video useful and that it helps you choose a case for your next Raspberry Pi project!

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