Should You Water Cool Your Raspberry Pi 5?

today we're going to be taking a look at this new water cooling kit that has been designed for a Raspberry Pi 5 we're going to see how its custom water block and performance stack up against my DIY solution that I built for a pi 4 a few years ago I also used this Solution on my pie cluster cooling eight Raspberry Pi 4S at once it worked really well for that so I expect it'll work well on the more powerful Pi five as well the water cooling kit has just been launched and currently costs $120 it includes a fan and water pump assembly along with a power adapter some flexible tubing to run to the water block and it also includes the installation Hardware like some thermal pads and screws the water block is a custom design for the pi five and the kit comes with a heat sink for the bottom of the p as well next we need something to compare it to and for that I'm going to try two different cooling options the first is the active cooler that is designed for the P five this is a cheap and simple solution costing just is $5 it's also commonly available it's got an aluminum heat sink covering the CPU and surrounding heat generating components and it's got a small pwm fan on it the second's my original water cooling setup for my Pi 4 I've had to make some changes to it to work with the pi five like redesigned the heat sink bracket for the new CPU location I've also strengthened the legs and holder for the p as these were a little flimsy on the original other than that it's pretty much the same set of components as especially the cooling Loop I'm going to use the same Raspberry p with each cooling solution for consistency I'll just switch it between each solution for each test I'm also going to be using the official par five power supply so that we don't run into any power or under voltage issues to test the thermal performance of each solution I'm going to use a utility that I used to test my previous setup called CPU bur this fully loads each of the CPU cores and I'll leave this running for about 10 minutes minutes on each so that we reach the point of equilibrium every time I expect the water cooling setups to perform quite well so we'll also try overclocking the power to 2.8 GHz and see how each handles the additional overclocking heat I did try get my power overclock to 3 GHz but I couldn't get it stable enough to survive a 10-minute stress test at this CPU frequency I'm going to set up a thermal camera watching each during the test so we can see any hot spots the thermal camera doesn't work on metallic surfaces so it will be a bit limited but we should still see any significant issues just out of Interest I ran the test first without any cooling solution connected and ran into thermal throttling after about half a minute it's evident by the drop in C frequency once we hit 85° for our coolers let's start with the active cooler as a Baseline with the active cooler installed on the power running CPU burn at the base frequency of 2.4 GHz the starting temperature is 41° the temperature climbs pretty quickly but starts to stabilize after about 5 minutes and we have an average stabilized temperature of about 66° with the power overclocked at 2.8 GHz the temperature starts at about 54° and climbs a bit faster this time it stabilizes after about 4 minutes at an average of about 74° at this temperature the fan steps up to its highest RPM and this actually brings the power back down to 71° quite quickly it then floats between 71 and 74° depending on the fan speed I'm actually quite impressed by this result I didn't expect a $5 cooler to handle a fully loaded overclocked Power without thermal throttling next let's get the pie filter to the water cooling kit assembly is pretty straightforward the water block obviously goes onto the top of the pie with a thermal pad between it and the CPU and some of the surrounding chips the aluminum heat sink goes underneath the P this provides a bit of additional cooling but also protects the p and prevents any shorts on the contacts on the bottom if you've got it on a desk or workbench I have to say that the custom water block with the copper base does look pretty good on the p even if it's a bit unnecessary it fits really well around the taller components and still looks like it'll allow you to hook up an SSD to the PCI Express Port we then connect up the flexible tubing between the water block pump and radiator there isn't a place to mount the p on this assembly so we'll just leave it on the desk alongside it this is by Design though as the kit can be used with multiple PES running in a cluster as well next let's fill up the loop with coolant and then boots up the p start our test this block handles the base frequency of 2.4 GHz really well we start off at about 30° then there's a small in temperature when the test ramps up but the temperature doesn't climb much after that it stabilizes after around 1 and 1/2 minutes at a temperature of about 45° with the power overclock to 2.8 GHz we now get a marginally higher starting temperature of 33° it again stays relatively flat stabilizing after a minute and a half at about 51° so this cooling solution works really well and we're still way under the thermal throttling limit for the pie now let's see if my DIY version can compete with it I use thermal paste for my Pi 4 build but I want to try and keep the comparison fair so I used the pad between the CPU and heat sink as well I like that my solution has a place to mount the P but the Kit's custom cooling block looks a lot better than my simple Square Block in bracket through testing some to the previous solution this block handles the base frequency really well we start with a slightly lower temperature of 29° then there's a small in temperature when the test is started but again the temperature doesn't climb much Under full load it stabilizes after about a minute and a half at a temperature of about 42° so actually around 2 to 3° lower than the kit with the power overclock to 2.8 GHz we again get a higher starting temperature of 35° it stabilizes after a minute and a half at about 49° so also about 2° lower than the kit so both the water cooling kits and my DIY solution work significantly better than the active cooler on an overclocked part but the active cooler is actually quite capable of cooling and overclocked P at its full load as well I'm a little surprised that my DIY solution with a simple aluminium block performed better than the Kit's copper based block I assume that this is most likely because of a difference in the thermal pads mine has a really thin and good quality pad another possible reason might be that mine has more metallic surface area with the water where the kits block only has a copper surface on the bottom the acrylic is a poor conductor of heat I think the main benefit of a water cooling setup besides looking cool is that they have the capacity to cool a few more than one part typically a good 120 mil radiator can dissipate over 200 wats given that the par five uses about 12 wat even if all of its energy is being converted to heat we'd still be able to cool over 16 Raspberry Pi fivs with one pump and radiator so while these are overkill for a single pie they're actually quite a good cooling solution for clusters there are some things I like about each water cooling solution over the other the manufactured option has a really goodlooking water block and it offers better coverage to the surrounding components the cooling block from the manufactured kit is also available individually so it's possible to buy one pump and radiator set and then use it across multiple PES which is also great I do have some concerns that they've used copper for the cooling block and supplied an aluminium radiator so you may run into issues with galvanic corrosion in your Loop long term i' definitely stay away from using water in the loop and I'd use proper coolant to try and assist in limiting this my only other comment on it is that the included reservoirs return line pushes a lot of air back into the loop which makes it quite noisy my DIY solution is significantly quieter I think my stand looks better overall and offers a place to mount the P but I'm probably a bit biased and as I've said a water cooling solution is really better suited for a cluster so the stand is unnecessary I'll leave links to the kit and components in the video description if you'd like to get your own for your P five let me know which solution you prefer and also if there's something else you'd like to see me test on it thanks for watching please remember to like this video If you enjoyed it and subscribe for more Tech and electronics projects tutorials and reviews

Channel: Michael Klements

Views: 4,299

Keywords: Raspberry Pi 5, Raspberry Pi, Pi 5, Water Cooled Pi, Water Cooling, 52Pi, Seeed Studios, Seeed, CPU Burn, Benchmarking, Thermal Testing, Overclocking, Thermal Test, 2.8Ghz, 2.4Ghz, Water Block, Buy vs DIY, Laser Cutting

Id: hJNLrgPhDpo

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2024