Raspberry Pi 5 - Performance, Thermals, and Overclocking

I have been testing the Raspberry Pi 5 for a few days to gather some data about its performance (compared to the Pi 4 and other devices), its thermal needs, and about the possibility of overclocking.
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00:00 - Intro
01:01 - Recap
03:07 - Performance
04:43 - Thermals and cooling
09:14 - Overclocking

#garyexplains

[ypat]

Have had my Pi5 for a little over a week now. As you say on your side of the pond, brilliant piece of tech. I have the official case with the fan plugged in. As for the case lid, it's been off, currently on. I have not overclocked it yet so no heat throttling. I may try but the Pi5 is so much better performance-wise than a Pi4 that I don't have an immediate need for overclocking. I'll keep the 2.9GHz threshold you uncovered on this revision of the chips. Thank you for experimenting.

[johnhunt]

Yes I'm getting a Pi5. Yes I'm getting active cooling. Yes I'm going to overclock. Yes I'm still disappointed it doesn't have at least two more cores (was hoping for 8).

[pabloqp]

Great video as always Sire!! Ordered mine here in Spain, should be home next week. Me first Pi! 🎉

[ernestuz]

I bought mine at the Raspberry store in the Lion Yard the day after it came available.
It seems to support up to 3.1GHz (stable, no overvolting), using active cooling. it worked well, I stressed it with s-tui for a couple of hours, I compiled a few programs (among them BOX86 and BOX64) without problems, performance wise it feels like a current low specced laptop.
A week or so ago I installed KDE's Plasma Desktop, and been using it since then.
There is a gotcha, though all the utilities measure the CPU clock to be 3.1GHz under load (I believe it's what cpufreq/cpuinfo_cur_freq contains), vcgencmd measure_clock arm returns approx 3.0GHz, so I do not think it's reaching 3.1GHz at all. The GPU only overclocks to 900MHz, but I am happy anyway :D. Thanks for your videos!

[masterneme]

Is the case fan loud in full power without lid?

[williamstevenson]

Thanks. I will undoubtedly get a 5 when the initial rush is over. Looks like the fan case will be enough for me, probably overclocking to a safe 2.8 GHz

[EnochGitongaKimathi]

Brilliant video Gary. Seems this Pi 5 has impressed even ARM who have bought a minority stake in Raspberry Pi Ltd. I love the investment. I'm hoping ARM can help Raspberry Pi secure better manufacturing for the SOC. It is amazing what they have done with 16nm but when Rock 5B is using an 8Core (4+4) CPU 8nm Chip, the excitement is diminished.

[NemoOhd]

I love the video. thanks for all you do

[ahmadalkhansa]

I'm still waiting for mine; hopefully it would arrive by the end of the month. I'm planning to create a k3s cluster with my raspberry pi 4 to boost the performance of the multiple services that I've already deployed.

[samthelion]

I wonder if the active cooling would fit inside the case if you remove the case's fan... Or if it makes sense at all to use the active cooling inside the case.

[test]

Perfect, just the question I would ask about CPU thermals. What about the io chip, does it need a heat sink? Thanks!

[ronrader]

FYI - anybody looking for a Pi 5, right now Digikey has over 1500 of each 4GB and 8GB

[Stabby]

I'm lucky I can pick up a Pi5 - or any other Pi - any day of the week from the local Pi store in Cambridge. They have them on the shelf here. :) There were several errors in the graphs and some text in this video, by the way - the "Lower is better" graphs were showing it being slower with multicore than single, for example.

[pixadordelterrat]

I'll wait for good passive-cooling aluminium cases to be available before getting a Pi 5.
Fans get noisier with time, they break, they gather dust... I see them as something archaic and I can't believe that we got to have computers without any moving parts except for them. We really need to find a replacement for fans.

[MrFilip]

I wonder how FLIRC cases will perform with the PI 5. Also wonder whether you can install Noctua 40mm fan, they do a 5V version and 20mm thick.

[leightaylor]

Thanks as always for another interesting piece.

I'm not getting the Pi 5 at the moment as I have too many (?) of the previous versions sitting unused. Trying to break the habit of always buying the new thing!

Could you tell us please what the ambient temperature was for your testing? Also does the Pi 5 case with the fan come with a small heatsink to attach to the board? If not, would a small heatsink help to increase the surface area for the forced convection?

I'm hoping that a heatsink as case / case as heatsink passive solution (e.g "Aluminium Armour - Heatsink Case for Raspberry Pi 4" but for Pi 5) will work. I like my computers as quiet as possible.

[letrainavapeur]

Mine is due for delivery tomorrow complete with cooler add on and PSU

[rgalik]

Hello. I have a question - if you watched a H.264 video the decoding wasn't done on the GPU but on the CPU, right? Then the video+stress test tests actually only loaded the CPU. Rpi5 doesn't have H.264 GPU decoding.

[spakeschannel]

Huh, guess that 3 GHz mark isn't guaranteed... ETA Prime was able to OC his RPi 5 to 3 GHz on CPU and 1 GHz on GPU, and it didn't throttle (under active cooling, of course).

[gregholloway]

Thanks for the video, Gary. I have been using my RPi5 with the official case for the last week. Works great and I concur with your temperatures. I went with the 4G model because my workloads (that I also ran on a Pi4) never needed more than 4. What app are you using alongside htop to show proc frequently and temp?