eaf got a reading of 45 deg C.
The metal enclosure of the ASIAIR is designed to behave as a heat sink (if you open one up, you can see an aluminum extension to form a thermal bridge from the processor to the top of the case through a hole in the daughter board).
The closer the heat sink (in this case, the enclosure) temperature is to the processor itself, the more efficient the heat sink is working (i.e., low thermal resistance between the heat sink and the processor). The ideal is for the heat sink (ASIAIR enclosure) to have the same surface temperature of the processor.
See this article about what to expect as the surface temperature of a well heat sunk Raspberry Pi 4 (a little north of 50ºC). The closer the enclosure can get to this temperature, the cooler the chip's core temperature will be.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=271933
Check the "core temperature" of the ARM processor in the ASIAIR's Settings Window. This can rise to over 80ºC before the ARM chip throttles its clock speed.
A better consumer product would use a large internal heat sink that has a fan blowing on it, so that the enclosure itself is not also serving as a heat sink (in the case of the ASIAIR, the enclosure even serves the purpose to block WiFi signals). But, to save money (maximizing profits) and bulk (and, power for fans), many industrial products do use the enclosure as a heat sink -- it is indeed quite pervasive in the world of NVME solid state drive enclosures.
A rule of thumb among us old engineers who still remember linear power supplies, a transformer is considered to run too hot only when it spits back at you when you spit at it. Otherwise, it is considered acceptable temperature :-). We didn't have iPad mounted FLIR cameras back then like I do today for my hobby.
Chen
