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

Written by Michael Larabel in Computers on 30 March 2019 at 08:00 AM EDT. Page 3 of 3. 19 Comments.

With a fan, the NVIDIA Jetson Nano was running TensorRT inference workloads with an average temperature of just 42 degrees compared to 55 degrees out of the box.

At about 50 degrees seems to be where the Jetson Nano triggers the PWM fan to turn on.

In single-threaded basic workloads like MP3 encoding, there obviously isn't much of a difference.

After hours of different benchmarks stressing both the Kepler GPU and Cortex-A57 cores, the fan-less out-of-the-box configuration led to around 58 degrees average with a peak of 69 degrees. When having the PWM fan attached, the average temperature under load was 42 degrees with a peak of 51 degrees. With the temperatures not hitting any extremes, there weren't any workloads in our temperature-controlled environment where thermal throttling was taking place for the Jetson Nano or the performance otherwise changing, which is good. But if you are planning to use a Jetson Nano board out in the field, hopefully these reference numbers will provide some guidance for extrapolating about the thermal behavior of this $99 Arm developer board.

More benchmarks of the exciting Jetson Nano will be coming up on Phoronix in April.

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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.