The Thermal Performance Of NVIDIA's Jetson Nano $99 Developer Board

[ldesnogu]

Hot and expensive - the usual hallmarks of Nvidia hardware. Active fan on ARM board? Oh lol, that sounds so much in x86 spirit.

I'm afraid you're being blinded by your Nvidia hate: even some Samsung chips need a fan

Other boards require a fan when you start pushing all CPU and GPU on a SoC. I would not feel comfortable with a passively cooled Chinese chip running at more than 70 deg such as in the Odroid N2.

[MarkG]

That could be the reason because it was throttling down, not enough power..

That could also be the reason because you experience that slowdowns..
since the commits to disk were not efective..

Exactly! I swapped to the 4.5A supply and most of the jumpiness stopped. I initially brought it up on the 2.5A RPi supply with power-hungry keyboard (back-lit) and mouse plugged in, driving a 3440x1440 monitor via DP.

Chromium with Hardware Acceleration enabled still has refresh/update "issues". Turning that off makes Chromium usable. Firefox seems more solid. Once I'm happy with the setup and development environment, I expect I'll unplug the peripherals and just use it remotely. So this should become a non-issue.

Can you, please, tell us what was the temperature of it?

At the moment, it's mostly idle, though I'm using it to post this reply. I beat it up earlier and never saw temps above low 50's C (except for the PMIC-Die which always says 100C). All well below the throttle points. The fan did spin up, then stopped again after it cooled off.

(I should add that I bought the wrong Noctua NF-A4x20 PWM fan. I got the 12V version, but it wants the 5V version...silly mistake.)

AO-therm:    38000
CPU-therm:   35000
GPU-therm:   31000
PLL-therm:   29500
PMIC-Die:   100000
thermal-fan-est:    33000

Those cores( cortex A57 ) are an evolution of Cortex A53,

This board is completely usable as a low-end desktop (email, light surfing, etc.), unlike the Raspberry Pi 3B, which I found too slow.

Edit: Added 'PWM' to the fan model.

[tuxd3v]

Exactly! I swapped to the 4.5A supply and most of the jumpiness stopped. I initially brought it up on the 2.5A RPi supply with power-hungry keyboard (back-lit) and mouse plugged in, driving a 3440x1440 monitor via DP.

Chromium with Hardware Acceleration enabled still has refresh/update "issues". Turning that off makes Chromium usable. Firefox seems more solid. Once I'm happy with the setup and development environment, I expect I'll unplug the peripherals and just use it remotely. So this should become a non-issue.


At the moment, it's mostly idle, though I'm using it to post this reply. I beat it up earlier and never saw temps above low 50's C (except for the PMIC-Die which always says 100C). All well below the throttle points. The fan did spin up, then stopped again after it cooled off.

(I should add that I bought the wrong Noctua NF-A4x20 PWM fan. I got the 12V version, but it wants the 5V version...silly mistake.)

AO-therm: 38000
CPU-therm: 35000
GPU-therm: 31000
PLL-therm: 29500
PMIC-Die: 100000
thermal-fan-est: 33000

This board is completely usable as a low-end desktop (email, light surfing, etc.), unlike the Raspberry Pi 3B, which I found too slow.

Edit: Added 'PWM' to the fan model.

First of all,
Thanks for posting your findings of that board

I think you made the correct choice...Nvidia made a mistake... not using 12V..
I expected them to put there a 12V fan...since a 12v fan is at least ~30%+ more efficient than a 5V one..

That Pmic, is burning..
put a heatsink on it at least
It his responsible for the power management, ( Could be that it was not properly designed for that power envelop, or it his only reporting badly the temps on it.. )

Does you have physical access to it..
I mean, doing the "finger touch" test.. Put the finger above it to fill the temp on it?

That board seems to have a PCIe M.2 conector right?
So we can put there a bigger emmc card..

Seems a nice Board!

Regards

[danboid]

Words of warning:

For those who want decent IO, note that the Jetson boards cannot boot off USB 3 but there is another Jetson Nano carrier board out in June which will have a x4 m.2 slot for using an SSD.

EDIT

I've had a mail off the NVIDIA Jetson engineers and they say XHCI (USB 3) boot should be supported in the next Jetpack release which is expected in June.

https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1049281/jetson-nano/usb-3-boot-on-jetson-nano/?offset=5

[AndyChow]

My Jetson Nano arrived yesterday. But, scheduled to arrive on Monday are the 4.5A power supply, cooling fan, and a faster/larger microSDXC card. I couldn't wait to play with it, so brought it up this morning passively cooled with the 2.5A power supply from my Raspberry Pi.

After applying Ubuntu updates and porting over some of my 'stuff', the heat sink became uncomfortably hot to touch, and it started to feel a bit "jumpy", where it would pause for about a quarter second at a time every few seconds. Perhaps it was throttling, or it was waiting on the sdxc card. But by the time I found all the temperatures under /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone*/temp, it cooled to the point where the heat sink was just warm.

I plan to try the benchmark suite in the coming days. So far, it's a great little board.

Are you saying it does not come with a power supply? I ordered mine from nvidia directly, I thought there would be a power supply! I ordered the kit the day after it was announced, and the order got delayed to April the 18th as a ship date. So I'm guessing they sold a ton of these.

If it doesn't come with a it, what voltage is the power-supply? 5v?

[SystemCrasher]

I'm afraid you're being blinded by your Nvidia hate: even some Samsung chips need a fan

Nvidia did more than enough to earn such opinion. When you do Linux stuff and key project manager of Linux (aka Torvalds) calls you "worst company ever" - that how you know you do it wrong. Why shouldn't I care of opinion of "my" project manager? Unlike Nvidia, Torvalds is always on the side of users, developers, system integrators and so on. As for Samsung, yet another sucking company, that's for sure. When I've looked on some board with Exynos it seems Samsung has been ugly enough to require DEVS to run proprietary, signed samsung's Trust Zone software. And of course DEV can't have neither source, nor keys - for most privileged and sensitive code in the system. Hmmph, trying to goofy devs like stupid consumers is really splendid idea. I loved it enough to utterly avoid their SoCs and even hardware in general. Because I can see what Samsung is up to.

Other boards require a fan when you start pushing all CPU and GPU on a SoC. I would not feel comfortable with a passively cooled Chinese chip running at more than 70 deg such as in the Odroid N2.

Yeah, I wouldn't run any IC at 70C if long-term reliability is a concern. On funny note, Chinese things could be relatively easy to adjust in regard of DVFS. Of course at cost of performance - but on other hand, most embedded things either get enough performance or not and running on the edge of ability is always a problem, because if you do, you can expect bugged, troublesome, unreliable system. It could be nasty even on desktop PC but even worse if it would happen in some control/automation/etc. Ofc one can use things like this as "generic PC" with Linux, however point of doing so is not immediately clear to me.

p.s. btw, tablets, etc use interesting approach to get rid of heat - they often use heat spread mat on back cover and so on. This allows 'em to sink considerable amount of heat without fan. The little catch is that finding such mats at affordable price as new part isn't necessarily easy. I've even seen couple of SBCs doing it similar way.

[MarkG]

Are you saying it does not come with a power supply? I ordered mine from nvidia directly, I thought there would be a power supply! I ordered the kit the day after it was announced, and the order got delayed to April the 18th as a ship date. So I'm guessing they sold a ton of these.

If it doesn't come with a it, what voltage is the power-supply? 5v?

See the discussion over on NVIDIA Developer forums:
https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/t...developer-kit/

[kieffer]

Any benchmark on the micro-SD performances? As it is a limiting factor for the various RPi, both mechanical (broken SD-card reader) and limited write speed (~20MB/s).
Is there an extension using eMMC or M2-SSDs ?

IO performance benchmark versus the Asus tinkerboard would be of some interest. (120MB/s IO speed)

[indiandragon]

but do you review at 5w or 10w ? (max) ?
there are two mode on this Jetson Nano

The first picture in the article has barrel jack connector & jumper, so I assume 10W power mode is being used as it should be. Still I would like phoronix to confirm.

[indiandragon]

Words of warning:
For those who want decent IO, note that the Jetson boards cannot boot off USB 3 but there is another Jetson Nano carrier board out in June which will have a x4 m.2 slot for using an SSD.

I think it's the SOM which is going to be sold separately in June, which can be used with carrier boards from other manufacturers.