Totally Legit FLIR AM4 Motherboard Image Testing

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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First and foremost, I did not know that FLIR had a camera (FLIR ONE Thermal Imager for Android) for $205 nowadays to do thermal imaging. The last time I looked, the things were several thousand dollars, so thanks to "Nerdy" Nathan Kirsh of Legit Reviews for the heads up on that!

On to the point however, and that is that Legit Reviews has put some of the new AM4 motherboards to the test in terms of heat and what you should look out for. Certainly worth a look.
The take home message from doing this article is that the keeping the CPU digital power components cool is important, but don’t forget about the memory power controller as it too gets just as hot, if not hotter!
 
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there isn't anything wrong.

and on a bench with no air flow over anything the temps will always be higher.

most cases have incidental airflow so the temps aren't as high as an open test bench.

and if you use an air cooler it also helps.
 
Just an FYI one of the images on the amazon page is a guy taking a thermal image of a piece of corn. If you take a thermal image of your food do you still use an Instagram filter?
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I use a thermal gun for my food on the grill to see if the food I'm cooking is going to get a nice crust. I'm sure that has SOME merit to the thermal imaging of food.
 
Yeah, thermal stuff has been getting cheap. The FLIR phone stuff has been around for a few years, it's a spin off of the small devkit. The price is so low because other companies came out with their own (Seek Thermal). FLIR has a patent on the overlay (called MSX, it overlays the visual camera image with the thermal to make a low resolution 64x64 px sensor seem better). Because of this, SEEK upgraded their sensors (256) to more pixels and focusable optics.

Fun fact, the old handheld units were sold in a good, better, best model. The difference between them was a firmware limitation on the chipset (forced lower resolution). With a few FW hacks, you could upgrade the $900 unit to the $6000 unit - FLIR caught on and won the cat/mouse came between FW and hacker.
 
I had a thermal design exam where we had to figure out how long it would take for the surface to get to a certain temp, so yea thermal cameras for food are awesome.

I don't have the flir for the phone but rather grabbed a http://www.thermal.com/products/compact/ seek thermal instead.
 
Also the Cat (as in Caterpillar) S60 has one built in. It's a mid-range phone that is also water-resistant to 2 meters normally or 5 meters in its water resistant mode. It retails for $599 if memory serves. If they can fix the optical camera quality issue It's what I'll be getting for my next phone.
 
Seems like there's a lot of awful review on this FLIR imager.. If someone at [H] buys it, please let us know the end result !
 
It's important to keep air flowing across the entire board. Components die when theres not enough airflow, not so much the temperature which the air is. If the air is 0 degrees C but not moving, components will burn up. If it's 90 degrees C but the air is moving, components will survive.
 
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CaptNumbNutz said:
Am I the only one that's geeking out over that awesome cheap FLIR camera and not the images?:hungry:

I didn't know those existed either. I have so many uses for something like that.
Click to expand...

Yes they're cool and all but caveat... they usually combine a CMOS imager with a very, very low res thermal imager. So you see the big thermal microbolometer array blotches (e.g. 80x80) overlaid on a much higher res CMOS feed.
The really expensive stuff is still really expensive because it's a pure higher res microbolometer array.

If you really want to be creative and can browse the depths of ali, you can (if you're lucky) find 1024x768 arrays (early to mid 00s millitary cutting edge resolution) with good pitch size and sensitivity for around 3kusd. I beleive someone got in trouble for listing these as I couldn't find them recently. Probably side production runs of an array for a high end product parts (50-100k cams) that were being sold on the cheap. The optics are a killer though, you have to use germanium currently until they can grow bigger diamonds. It's almost the same cost as the array. There are another few breakthroughs in this field coming too.

TLDR: these flir modules are really just glorified CMOS sensors with very low res thermal response overlaid.

Sorry to burst your dreams ;)
 
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