What do you think of this module?

Ouch. Yeah, I’d be worried if it hit the 90s.

I have kind of a pile of SBC heatsinks, I probably would have cut a hole in the back to fit one if it didn’t come with something to cool it off. The CM-4 can barely get by without a heatsink, the A-06 really needs one. The RK1 (similar CPU, 3588 vs. the A-06’s 3399) has a heatsink with a built-in a fan and case fans and it idles at ambient room temperature, but that wouldn’t work on a machine like the DevTerm (bulky heatsink plus all the fans uses a little more juice).

The R-01 I’ve been running with no heatsink. 40 degrees, never gets past 50 when its single core is fully loaded. I’d be really excited about a beefier RISC-V one; it seems about time for a new CPU board, but the existing ones still do the job fine; I use the A-06 about as much as I use my desktop machine.

I seem to remember reading about upgraded components in later shipments.

Yeah, basically moves the heat to the sheet and also covers the vent slots in the back of the case up to the fan, so it makes a little duct instead of just shooting air in the general direction of the CPU and hoping for the best. I didn’t see pictures of it in anyone’s build (I spent an excessive amount of time looking at pictures before the DevTerm arrived; I was very excited) and it came with separate instructions so I figured that it wasn’t part of the first run.

I think cranked all the way down the A06 is probably friendlier with battery life than the CM4?

I think so, but you can turn off cores in the CM-4 by doing sudo sh -c 'echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuN/online' (replacing N) for as many cores as you want to turn off, and setting the powersave governor. I kind of wonder why the gear system doesn’t just change governors around instead of setting max frequency; like you can set the CPU governors independently, and that caps all of them at the min frequency, and adjust. There’s a “conservative” governor that is like ondemand or schedutil but it has a delay when changing frequencies so there’s a ramp-up and ramp-down period, but I think (don’t quote me on this, haven’t checked, going from memory) that it’s not included for the CM-4.