The Thermal Performance Of NVIDIA's Jetson Nano $99 Developer Board

We weren't seeing much in the way of different performance results.

But we were seeing the actively cooled Tegra X1 SoC obviously running a bit cooler. In the case of running Java 2D benchmarks, the SoC was running around two degrees cooler but even without a fan in this basic benchmark the package never went above 45 degrees.

With GLmark2 being more demanding on the Maxwell GPU than the Java OpenGL pipeline, after a while having the fan attached did help break the rising temperatures although even out-of-the-box for this long-running benchmark we didn't appear to hit any thermal throttling as the performance results were unchanged.

With the Leela Chess Zero benchmark and using the CPU-based BLAS back-end, there ended up being about a 25 degree difference in the results for this long-running benchmark! But still even with no fan, the SoC peaked at 72 degrees while with fan running peaked at 45 degrees.

When firing up Leela Chess Zero again with the CUDA+cuDNN back-end, there still was quite a difference in the cooling although the raw performance results were unchanged. The average temperature was lower by about 20 degrees.