Troubleshooting • Freezing under load with Raspberry Pi 4B 1gb, me or the pi?

Problem hardware:

• A Raspberry Pi 4b 1gb

Operating systems tried:

• A Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit (bookworm)

• Raspberry Pi OS 32-bit (bookworm)

• Raspberry Pi OS 32-bit legacy (bullseye)

I recently got a raspberry Pi 4b and Zero 2 W (from adafruit if that matters). I was able to test the Zero 2 W and it works fine but the 4b keeps freezing under load. By freezing I mean the screen stays up, but I can’t move the cursor or interact with anything in any way, I even tried SSH with putty and while it didn’t time out, the console stayed blank and unresponsive. This is especially easy to trigger by opening chromium and trying to look things up, but opening a bunch of random programs still freezes it the same way.





These are the things I tried that had no effect:

1: Multiple power supplies

• A 2.4amp USB power supply

• A 3amp USB power supply

• My desktops motherboard USB3.2 port

• Directly wiring the board to the 5 volt output of my 850w desktop power supply (pin 2 to 5v and pin 6 to common).

2: Multiple cooling solutions

• First I just added a fan blowing on the board

• Then I tried printing a case that uses a 120mm fan

• Put heatsinks on the main chipset, ram, ethernet controller, and USB 3.0 controller with arctic MX4 thermal compound and silicone tacking the corners to the board (easier to clean than thermal adhesive).

• Adding a velocity stack to the aforementioned 120mm cooling case.

3: Multiple micro SD cards

• First I used a teamgroup “high endurance” 64gb card

• Next a random old 32gb low quality PNY card I had in a drawer

• An old sandisc 16gb card

• A low grade 8gb card I got for working with “marlin” printer control boards (they don’t like high capacity SD cards)

4: Multiple versions of the OS, as mentioned above

5: Staring at it really hard

6: Waiting half an hour to see if it would unfreeze itself.



The only thing that I’ve seen have any positive effect so far was putting “over_voltage=6” into the config.txt after I looked at an overclocking guide to see what underclocking would involve. It made it work longer but it still froze after a couple add filled websites were open, so I’m now worried that it’s a hardware issue. Should I try underclocking outright, and to what frequencies? What is the voltage limit anyway?

Statistics: Posted by Rabid_Imperial_Guard — Fri Jul 05, 2024 2:20 am

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