Crickets ...

Is Bitmain still applying thermal paste with a pneumatic butter knife?

I think the only other thing to try would have been something like a long nylon cleaning brush from an electric razor dipped in alcohol. Still tricky though.

Minera, Raspian

You can, but its not required by any means!

Any good recommendations for a raspberry pi based controller that supports the U3?

I am familiar with minera for Gridseed devices but was unable to get it to detect the U3 I was offering this as a suggestion for a future guide from you if you had time to put together a setup guide for Running the U3 off of the Pi to expand off this setup guide. I have also tinkered with Minera but the latest build has an outdated cgminer and wont detect the U3 and the bfgminer works but only hashes at 4GH. I am still tinkering but no clean off the shelf solution to run a Pi with the U3 yet without some tinkering

after some tinkering i got minera to work with some ease. Minepeon is to outdated to work with the U3 out of the box for anyone else looking to run these on a pi go with Minera and change from default of CPU miner to CGMINER on the latest version 4.0.0 works with only those changes

It looks to be exactly the same fan, so it then depends on what your definition of 'silent' is. To me they're as quiet as ambient, but its personal opinion.

I got a brand new U3 straight from Bitmain over amazon.  Have been fiddling with it all night and can't seem to get it recognized by CGminer.  I have done all the steps and don't know what else to do?  Any ideas would be helpful.

My zadig says the Driver loaded on "CP2102 USB to UART Bridge Controller" is WinUSB (v6.1.7600.16385)

I downloaded CGMiner 4.9.0 and made a notepad file with this in it...
cgminer.exe  -o us1.ghash.io:3333 -u DebitMe.U3 -p 123
and saved it as a .bat file in the cgminer folder.

My Devices and Printers folder shows the unit as "CP2102 USB to UART Bridge Controller"

When I start CGMiner it says "No Devices Detected"

What am I missing?  It seems to be recognized by my computer, but just not by CGMiner.