Raspberry Pi 5 - is the active cooler or the housing with fan worth it?
Is it worth using the new Raspberry Pi 5 with the official case including fan or the official active cooler? To find out, I tested it in various configurations in Geekbench 6.
I got myself the new Raspberry Pi 5 to do various things with it over the coming months. Among other things, I'm going to turn it into a retro gaming berry using Batocera Linux. But before we get to that point, there are some fundamental questions, one of which I would like to answer here: How much better does the small computer perform if I use it cooled rather than "naked"? How much more performance can I expect with the official case that has a fan? How much more with the active cooler? And how does this active cooler react when I use it in the official case (without a case fan)?
In order to be able to provide answers, I had the DIY computer compete in the Geekbench 6 CPU benchmark in various configurations. The predecessor Raspberry Pi 4 is also included for comparison.
I sourced the following products from our warehouse for this test:
You can find an overview of the specifications of the new Raspberry Pi 5 in its datasheet or in the following article:
The results: Multi-core tasks benefit from active cooling
Before I present the results in detail, I would like to briefly discuss the fans.
Source: Martin Jud
The official case comes with a case fan and a small heat sink that you stick onto the CPU. As the case fan is removable, you can also use the case with another fan or without. However, the latter makes no sense, as the case fan runs quietly and you don't want heat build-up.
Source: Martin Jud
The official active cooler, for example, fits easily into the case. However, it runs anything but quietly. It hisses with an annoying noise level as soon as you close the housing cover. This is due to the ventilation slots, which are too narrow for its performance. Without the housing, however, it is mostly inaudible and only makes an audible but not disturbing noise when fully utilised. Incidentally, the heat sink of the active cooler covers three chips on the board at once, promising better cooling in purely visual terms. More than one fan cannot be operated due to a single connection on the board.
But now to the Geekbench results. I used the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit) as the operating system. I ran Geekbench 6 three times for each configuration and took the arithmetic mean as the result in each case. The Raspberry Pi 4 uses the quad-core Arm Cortex-A72 with a normal 1.5 gigahertz (GHz) base clock. I also do not overclock the Raspberry Pi 5 (it can be overclocked up to 3 GHz). It is equipped with the quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 with a base clock of 2.4 GHz. As soon as the temperature of the CPU reaches 85 degrees Celsius, it clocks itself down.
The Raspberry Pi 5 performs slightly more than three times better than its predecessor in single-core tasks (score of 761 compared to 247). In multi-core tasks, it is 2.3 times as good (score of 1308 compared to 566). Somewhat surprisingly for me, it hardly matters whether you run the Raspberry Pi 5 with or without a heat sink or fan for single-core tasks. With multi-core, on the other hand, it does - the performance increase is 15.8 per cent or around 200 points. Whether you use the active cooler or the housing fan plus the small heat sink hardly changes the result.
My recommendation: definitely cool, but with what is secondary
In terms of price, both the official case with fan and the active cooler are worthwhile. For around 17 and 10 francs/euro respectively, you get around 16 per cent more performance in multi-core tasks
As the increase in performance is the same with both cooling options, it is not worth buying both in order to install the active cooler in the official case. This combination is also not recommended due to the resulting loud noise. You should therefore only buy the active cooler if you want to operate the Raspberry Pi 5 without a housing. Or if you have another case to hand that has larger ventilation slots than the official one.
Titelbild: Martin Jud77 people like this article
Martin Jud
Senior Editor
martin.jud@digitecgalaxus.chI find my muse in everything. When I don’t, I draw inspiration from daydreaming. After all, if you dream, you don’t sleep through life.
