Argon One M.2 Raspberry Pi 4 Case 

My first computer was an IBM PC I put together out of parts I was supposed to send back to IBM, working as an IBM field technician back in 1984. The motherboard alone cost $1500 to buy as a part, so I did component level repairs on things I needed, until I built a system. Something one can't do today. One look at today's motherboard, and one will faint at the thought of repairing it! Now, one can buy a RPi 4 for under $100 that is 400+ times faster (1600 times with 4 cores), and has 500,000+ times the RAM of an original IBM PC! How far and fast we have come! Amazing times.

This is the perfect box to replace my 12 year old Linux box. I love the adaptor for the full size HDMI ports. The M.2 drive just puts the icing on the cake. Thanks as always Chris. You're a gentleman and I could listen to your videos all day.

This is why I love your videos. You introduce not only new SBCs, but really good multi-function cases and accessories for them. Most of the time I'm writing things down for consideration of maybe buying something you showcased in the near future. I love this stuff. :)

Yay, my favourite computing channel did a video on my pi case! I bought the Argon One M.2 in November and it has served me very well.

The Argon 1 M.2 has made the perfect case for OpenCPN on my sailboat. Robust, integrated, compact, and should help the Pi survive in the marine environment. Great review, as always!

Thanks Chris, you made your case for this case! I love the design it’s a easy build for anyone. 👍🏼

1:25 "Oh, there's an instruction leaflet in here, that's always good to have." (Tosses it aside like a true pro.)

Still loving your videos. No fakeness. Always professional. Thanks Chris.

You, sir, are the source of my computer literacy, and I can't thank you enough.

I am a railway muddler. It's way past time I got a Pi or two. Great video as ever; concise, to the point and clear. Cheers Chris! Keep Well, sir.

It is definitely a good looking case that goes together nicely. Great video, as always.

You had me at "All the connectors are on the back"! Trying to arrange several Pis in anything other than a stack is normally a messy endeavor! :)

I got two. One for my Retropie build and one for my dedicated Minecraft server. Both got 250GB Samsung 860s. Love this kit. Thank you for showing it off for the rest of the world to see.

The assembly of this case is so easy that I could do it single handed on my own in a few minutes. I love it.

I still love what you did for your "Ultimate raspberry Pi" video but this one is going to be my ultimate raspberry pi!

Thank you for this awesome post. Been looking for a next-level case beyond bare Canakit type shells for my 4s. This post was super helpful mate.

Love this case and the M.2 drive is screaming fast! The best thing is, even with Pi Hole running 24/7 the fan never comes on. And it's also very nice having the unit turn on automatically after a power outage. I always forgot about it and would scratch my head when the internet didn't come back after a reasonable amount of time.

I actually bought one of these (with the M.2 upgrade) about a month or so ago to house my new Pi-based NAS. I really love it, it's quite solid in its construction!

I'm quite happy with my Argon One (non-M.2) case. It gets quite warm during operation, meaning it does a good job at pulling the heat off of the Pi's IC's.

Extensive and to the point reviews. No unnecessary, feigned excitement or theatricals as Linus who had binged on sugar candy. Subscribed!

really like how they devised a daughterboard to bring out the micro HDMI to conventional connector sizes - and the SSD USB connector was interesting as makes it simple to quickly take the SSD out of the picture for special project use cases of the Pi

Wow Chris, that is a VERY impressive case. If I were ever to use a Raspberry Pi as a daily driver, that's the case I would get. Thanks for the (as always) great review.

That second thermal pad triggered my OCD lol. Awesome video again my friend 👍

I bought several of these cases for a project after watching your review, Chris. I added a heatsink with thermal adhesive pad to the top of the case for each one, and it dropped the temperatures down a few degrees cooler than your test results. It doesn't look as nice, but it is performing very well on 8GB Raspberry Pi 4's with Ubuntu and with Raspberry Pi OS (32-bit, Buster).

Argon has stepped up bigger on cases! Awesome!

Always excited for a new video! Thank you!

It's nice to see vendor taking into consideration criticism as they put regular HDMI sockets in contrast with the previous version of the product

Beautiful little case! I am very tempted to pick one up!

I've been wanting to see a video (by you) about this case! :)

Thanks C. Been using this case for a while now. Can't say enough about how great it is. My Rpi 4 4GB in this case running Twister is my main system, now. My only knock against it is that I needed an external wifi to get any reception with it. I use ethernet, now with no issues.

Again amazing review and awesome little case... You are the best SBC / tech channel. 👍🏻✌🏻🇨🇦

What a great video! Very informative and educational, as well as inspiring me to go out and buy one of my own.

This is pretty neat, I might need to get one for an application I have. I wish there were more cases that brought all of the connections out the back.

I think the biggest selling point is the design! I love the look of it and the easy access/assembly!

Chris, you're a legend.

Hi Chris, a belated Towel Day greetings to you. I just bought a Baofeng Tri-band radio for about $35 here and it seems to be performing quite well soo far. I also took this opportunity to get out my Ailunce HD-1 and begin to program it. I bought it shortly before getting sick so now I decided is the time. I also had a very nice surprise and discovered that if I downloaded a certain driver the memory locations DOUBLE without the need to send into a shop. And to top it all off I downloaded several codeplugs that hope to have installed before the summer is over. All I can say is THANK YOU Ailunce!! You never mentioned, that I recall, if you said you were a Ham or not. I find that it is good to have several ways to make contact with the rest of the world in an emergency. Just a brief story to illustrate my point, some years ago when mobile phones were new a local fire chief held aloft his shiny new mobile and pronounce to all of the surrounding Hams, that he felt that hams had become redundant. Naturally, the hams had two unvoiced opinions, one - "I've heard that before" and "We will see." One of the chief hams knew the area and sly challenged him to make a contact right now. The fireman fired it up and got NO bars, not even static. The chief ham knew that they were standing in an rf "Black Hole". He then proceeded to make an effortless contact to another ham, who was standing by some miles away in crystal clear audio. "Civilians" have no concept of such things while Hams do. The ham left him with two parting thoughts, 1- That Amateur radios death has been predicted many times before, and 2- Good luck with his new toy. and walked away trying to stifle a laughing fit with some of the other hams present. I'm a bit wordy but I didn't have the time to make it any shorter. 73

The glittery silver grey paint finish reminds me of the early *_TRS-80_* computers!

Great review! I’m hoping to get my hands on one of these myself soon as well! It looks like an amazing case!

Just got mine and assembled along you. Thank you very much, this is such a good looking case!

Good to see Stanley the Knife again. And, as always another excellent video.

Well worth considering. Interesting, informative and well presented, thanks.

Most interesting as ever. I'm so pleased you didn't video the tearing apart of the 'Ultimate Raspberry Pi 4 Rig'. I couldn't have coped. A sad day.

Thank you Chris, another great video!

Just what I needed at this time, thanks

Excellent review as usual...I very much enjoy your series. Three additional thoughts: 1. Running the RPi without the GPIO cover significantly improves cooling...that might be an interesting metric to add to your table. 2. The Argon One's power port frees up the RPi's original USC-C port !!! Unbeknownst to many, this port is also capable of passing data as well as power delivery ( the Argon One's USB-C is only capable of power delivery). I modified my case to connect an Apple iPadPro OEM cable USB-C cable to this connector, and can directly power and connect to the RPi via SSH or XRDP from my iPadPro while on the road. I have full access to my programming environments (command-line, Python, Jupyter Hub, etc.) as well as RPi desktop accessible from the iPadPro ( I don't own / need a tradition laptop anymore ;-) ). 3. Argon sells just the M.2 bottom-half of the case to upgrade the original Argone One for about $25 USD. -Thanks! -d

I use this case for several months now and I'm very pleased with it. Though I must point out that if you have a complete new Rasperry Pi4, you have to make a Firmware update first, before you can boot from a SSD.

Considering everything this case has, the price is actually pretty amazing!

From steampunk to cyberpunk - another excellent video.

A *most excellent* find ... thanks for introducing this to the world!

So glad to see you got around to reviewing this amazing RPi case. Love this case. But I have to admit - blocking the microSD port is a pain. Also - it bothered me it includes full size HDMI ports. I bought a microHDMI to HDMI cable for the RPi but can't use it now.

I always look forward to your videos. Great and informative site!!

Yep have the original Argon 1 case. Still need to upgrade to this model with the full size HDMI. Thanks for another video and as always, cheers and stay well.

Great video as always, Many Thanks Chris

This is just about the Ultimate case for the RPI 4 - my only (almost too minor) comment is to take the door off the top that covers the GPIO PINS OUT I noticed a 2-3 degree drop in temp from doing this, as I think it helps increases airflow. Bought a RPI 4 about 2 months ago and love it - used this case to go from the 32 GB micro SD card to a 128GB SSD. This case might seem expensive but it's worth it and it looks sharp. Great video!

Really nice I love your video's I learn more and more every Sunday

thank you, really good review and lots of useful information!

Ive got one of those older argon cases...but I absolutely love it.

Very sweet case. Thanks for another great video.

Excellent content as usual. Thank you

Very interesting seeing what can be done with such a small form factor! I like your ultimate build better though!

It is a nice Case . Have been using it for three months.Temperature is well control.

Thanks as always for such great content!

I think this is the first time I bought something just before your video came out on the same item. I'm very surprised at the bad reviews left in the comments. My impressions are down below. I bought the Pi4 and Argon case to run JMRI on my model railroad. I bought the Argon One M.2 for the SSD and full size HDMI interfaces. I set up the Pi with SD card and SSD connected. Booted from SD card, did all upgrades, then used SD card copier. Took out the SD card and booted from SSD. Works great on two monitors. WiFi: I use the Pi in the basement, the router is on the first floor. Looks to be working properly. Occasionally, when browsing the web, the Pi looks to take a bit of time but I don't know if it's the WiFi signal, or the speed of the Pi. Temperature: I used the thermal pads. I set up the scripts to run the fan at default 50, 55, 60 degrees C at 10, 55, 100%. The Pi is in the basement which is cool 50's degrees F. So far for what I'm currently using it for, the Pi has not gone above 42 degrees C. If I put my hand on the case, it feels very warm. Makes a nice hand warmer. I have not stressed out the Pi in this case, but am glad to see what Chris used to do so. I will be doing this as well as a sanity check for me to know that the Pi is running as it should. I will also rerun the config script to run the fan continuously and see how it runs or how loud it runs.

I have this case! It's really nice. I use it as my bench pi for writing my python scripts for my other pi projects. The top fits a GPIO ribbon cable just fine, thankfully.

I built one of these using Pi4 4GB, WD 250GB SSD, and put in a 256GB MicroSD because I had a spare. Bought the $10 remote control too. The best things about the case are that all the connectors go in the back, full-size HDMI, and neatness of the overall case. It sits in my office as a media hub and DVR, using a $12 cheapo HDMI/USB video capture dongle that actually gives great performance for my purposes.

Classy brass. Reminds me of fancy clock on brass base with glass dome.

Argon one, I thought you was playing x2 threat for a second. Like the video by the way.. 👍

I hope they can re-route the CSI connector as well. Overclocking the Pi with this case and using an SSD definitely help when doing computer vision projects.

Finally we can take........ a closer look, again 💪😍

That loop back USB to USB is such a kludge to get a USB HD/SSD connected. - 8:56 It has to be exactly that spacing and the Pi is the only use for one.

Its a good case, all good been running it for months as my Amiga emulator!

Nice video, always enjoyable Chris! I'd be curious to see if the custom config option allows the fan to be set to kick in at a lower temp and so compete with the higher end coolers?

Full size HDMI… SOLD!!! Also love how you always add screws diagonally for torsion control.

Another cool video from our favourite channel. And behold it's has co-starring Stanley.

Sweet set up.

Great job, Chris 👍

Looks like pretty good value for all that you get. Nice.

I use this case for 3 month and this is the best case I ever had for my NAS. I'm thinking about buy another one for building a gaming console.

Amazing Video Chris 👍

One thing that is really useful to have with one of these cases is a USB3 A plug to A plug cable. This allows a PC to be connected directly to the bottom USB3 connector (SSD) on the Argon One. This allows setting up the SSD in situ.

I got this case a while ago. I love it. Kinda reminds me of Tesla's cybertruck aesthetic wise.

Love your channel!

That is fantastic and would make a nice little portable desktop.

Cool as always.

Idk why, but I stopped receiving notifications from your channel for maybe a month, glad to be back.

Great product Thanks for sharing :-)

i adore the little usb bridge

Looks Futuristic

I have this case and it’s awesome!

New Neo case looks pretty cool

I love the Pi computer idea. Computers can be very expensive and so any computer made to be cheap gets a thumb up for me.

A round of applause for Stanley the knife please....

Looks like they could add a couple very nice features pretty easily. Extend the SD card slot out slightly and give you a slot to use it on the case, and flip the M2 socket onto the bottom of the board, with a hatch in the case bottom for easy access. If they could find a way to jumper the USB3 connection internally as well so you don't use up a port for the connection, this would be about the best case out there.

Argon One have released a M.2 Expansion board for the original Argon One, £18

Your Videos look like 20 years old. That's why I like them.

Good review! If it took NVME drives, I'd grab one of these. I'm reluctant to buy a SATA SSD when NVME SSDs cost only a bit more and are significantly faster if moved to a PC or whatever.

Love your style! 😊 👍🦅

Nice case. I 'rolled my own' mounting a pi 4 and 2.5" form factor SSD inside a case for Home assistant. I also had the idea to use solid aluminum stock (1/2" X 1/2", two of them) to come in contact with the CPU and ram chip and carry that heat out to the all aluminum case. I'm not using any fan. Only the mass of the bar stock and the exterior of the case to carry away the heat. I'm also using a bulkhead type ethernet connector that has punch down connects and a very short cat 6 to get my ethernet connection out. The only penetrations in the case are the ethernet connector, 5vdc power supply to the pi board, and I cut a slot just for convenience for the sd card just in case I need to use one and as such won't have to open the case to access it. There are two board slide rails inside the case and I have internal copper clad board that I used to mount everything. the only screws that are outside the case are the stock end plate mounting screws, and two bevel head screws I use to mount the 1/2" x 1/2" barstock solidly to the case for good heat transfer. The case that I chose: www.amazon.com/dp/B07KYDVH4T?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2_dt_b_product_details The SSD cable that I chose that fits in the box nicely and is fully compatible with the pi (Linux compatible): www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y825SB8?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2_dt_b_product_details Ethernet connector: www.amazon.com/dp/B07JZFWB1X?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2_dt_b_product_details All together I have about $30 dollars invested in hardware for a case and a few hours labor, although I have the time and enjoy these kinds of project, but really for the time and labor involved in rolling your own solution I think that the Argon case is well worth the money. It's an eloquent solution.

You must have millions of gadgets all over the place. Smart case.

Very cool case. My ultimate Pi project. is a 8Gb with the armored heatsink fan case very much like yours with fans, A SSD that has the same foot print as the raspberry pi and a flat usb a to c cable that zigzags from the front to the back through the case, a little bit of heat insulation padding between heatsink case and SSD and two cable ties that make a good rubber feet substitute... Running the beta of 64 bit raspbian as a little media server/streamer/NAS I would seriously consider the case If I was building again...