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A couple of weeks ago I built a water-cooled Raspberry Pi 4. It was a fun project and it came out looking pretty good, but was obviously crazy overkill for a single Raspberry Pi. This isn’t actually why I bought the water-cooling kit, I bought it along with 7 other Raspberry Pis to try building my own water-cooled Pi cluster.

While water cooling a single Pi doesn’t make much sense, it’s actually quite an effective solution for a cluster. A single large fan means less noise and it actually works out cheaper than many other fan and heat sink solutions given that you’d need to buy 8 of them.

For those of you who don’t know what a Pi cluster is, it’s essentially a set of two or more Pis that are connected together over a network and work together to perform computing tasks by sharing the load.

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Supplies:
To build my Pi cluster, I got together 8 Raspberry Pis, a network switch, a PC water cooling kit, some cooling blocks and then a bunch of network cables, USB charging cables, standoffs and screws.

Here’s a summary list of the basic parts required with some suggested purchase links:

8 x Raspberry Pi 4B (2GB Model Used)
TP Link 16 Port Ethernet Switch
Rav Power USB Charging Hub
HD Touchscreen Monitor
Water Cooling Kit
8 x 30mm Cooling Blocks
8 x Ethernet Patch Leads
8 x USB C Cables
3m RGB LED Strip
M3 Standoff Mount Kit
M3 Screw Kit
3mm MDF Board Approx. 600 x 600mm”

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