The Labists starter kit is a great kit to get up and going right out of the box in minutes.
Before I get into the details regarding the Labists kit, the main reason I made this purchase was to score an 8 GB Raspberry Pi 4. They were hard to find at the time, and when I broke down the price, the Labists kit seemed like a good value to me at $120 (a 8 GB Pi by itself runs around $75). It had a decent looking heatsink and fan, so I figured it’d be good to use for my Ubuntu setup. After I set it up and tested it out, I was a little underwhelmed by the performance. Let’s take a look:
The kit includes everything you need to get started with your Pi: the Pi itself, case, heatsink/fan, power supply, SD card, and the proper HDMI cables. The heatsink comes with a fan already attached and as a bonus, it has some RGB LEDs that light up and change color when the unit is on. A neat aesthetic touch that doesn’t add to the performance, but looks kind of cool. The case itself looks nice, basically it’s a standard Pi case with a clear vented top to show off the lights. It was fairly easy to put together and in minutes I was booted up and ready to test the kit for cooling.
The Argon One case was the baseline I used for testing the Labist kit. The Argon One did a great job of keeping the Pi cool at around 45 C idle. I figured with the Labists large heatsink and fans it would do a similar job of cooling the Pi. I was a bit disappointed with my findings. The Labists idle temp was about ten degrees higher than the Argon One, and when I did a quick stress test the Labists setup hit 80 C, which is a bit on the high side for me, and at that temp the Pi’s CPU started to throttle. I even tried thermal paste in place of the thermal pads to see if it made a difference. It might have shaved off a couple degrees, but the Labists still remained a bit on the warm side.
If you’re not overclocking or pushing your Pi to the limit, the Labists kit isn’t a bad setup. For a beginner wanting something easy to set up and use out right of the box, this might be for you. If you’re looking for a case with exceptional cooling performance for overclocking, look at something else like an Argon One to meet your needs.
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