How to Install Heat Sinks on the Raspberry Pi

Whether you're overclocking your Pi, running it in a hot environment or just want your Pi to look awesome, our high quality Raspberry Pi heat sink kits can help to reduce the operating temperature of the Raspberry Pi's SoC and LAN chip, and extend its life.

If you've got one of our Raspberry Pi heat sink kits and now you want to know how to attach it to your Raspberry Pi read on! You'll need the following:

• A Raspberry Pi B+, A+ or Raspberry Pi 2 Model B. Our kits are also compatible with the older Model A & B, but they may be a little bigger than the chips.
• Two heat sinks - the larger is for the Broadcom SoC, and the smaller is for the LAN chip. (our kits come with both included)
• Heat sink thermal adhesive strip (our kits come with this included)
• A sharp knife
• A cutting surface that you won't mind getting scored!

Place the larger of your two heat sinks on top of the thermal strip and butt it up to the corner so you have a flush edge on both sides. Firmly push down on the heat sink from above, and use the knife to cut flush to edge of the heatsink one of the overlapping sides.

If there's left over on the other edge, trim this off.

Do the same for the smaller heat sink. You will have some heat sink adhesive left over, which is useful if you mess one of them up, or want to uninstall and re-install the heat sinks at a later date.

You should now have two cut to size heat sink adhesive pieces that match your two heat sinks.

The thermal adhesive is double sided - it doesn't matter which is connected to the heatsink, and which is connect to the chip, so don't worry too much when attaching.

Peel off one of the layers and stick the thermal adhesive to the flat, bottom side heatsink.

Do this for both of your heat sinks.

If you have any excess or overlap, just flip the heat sink over and trim it off.

You can then peel off the secondary covering layer of the thermal adhesive strip and stick them to your Pi's chips.

The larger one goes neatly on the main Broadcom SoC, and the smaller fits on the LAN chip.

Whilst the ahesive is sticky at this point, it's designed to bond more securely once it's been heated. Simply running your Pi up to temperature for a short period is enough to thermally bond the chip, adhesive and heat sink.

So there you go, Your Raspberry Pi heatsink kit is now secure, your Raspberry Pi looks awesome and it's running cooler!