Summary
I think the Pironman 5 is excellent. It’s not a cheap case, particularly when you factor in the other components needed. But you get what you pay for. Great build quality and good software support. Don’t think of the Pironman 5 as merely a case. It transforms a Raspberry Pi 5 into a desktop mini PC yet retains all the usefulness of the Pi for projects.
From my perspective, the key selling point of the case is the excellent cooling system, yet the machine is silent unless its under heavy sustained loads. Combine that with the NVMe performance uplift making the machine more responsive, it feels more like a regular desktop mini PC compared to using the Pi from a slow microSD card. And the Raspberry Pi 5 is no slouch. Here’s a chart showing the time it takes to build fooyin (an excellent music player for Linux). The Pi 5 runs the N100 processor close.
While the web frontend offers many configuration options for the RGB case fans, the PWM fan characteristics are not customizable. But if, for example, you want to change the temperature activation levels of the PWM fan, there’s still the option to manually edit /boot/firmware/config.txt.
The Pironman 5 is available on Amazon UK priced at £69.99 and on Amazon US priced at $81.99.
In the next article, I’ll investigate the power consumption of the Raspberry Pi 5 with the Pironman 5 case.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Assembly
Page 2 – Software
Page 3 – Cooling
Page 4 – Disk Performance
Page 5 – WiFi Performance
Page 6 – Summary
All articles in this series:
| Raspberry Pi 5 Series | |
|---|---|
Hardware | |
| iRasptek Starter Kit | All the kit you need to get started with the Pi 5 |
| Pironman 5 Case Review | Transform the Pi 5 into a beautiful desktop mini PC |
| Passive Cooling the Pi 5 | Passively cool your Pi 5 the right way. Silent yet cool |
| Benchmarking | Benchmarking the Pi 5 against an Intel N100 mini PC |
| Overclocking | Let's increase the clock speed of the BCM2712 SoC |
| Power Consumption | Compare the power consumption of the Pi 5 with Intel Mini PCs |
| 2.5Gbps Networking | Improving the wired performance of the Pi 5 |
Configuration | |
| raspi-config | Useful text-based tool to configure the Pi 5 |
| PiGro | GUI tool that streamlines the process of managing the Pi 5 |
| Increase Swap Memory Size | Increase the swap size from 512MB to 2GB |
| ZRAM swapdrive | Simple script to use a ZRAM swapdrive instead of a swapfile |
Software | |
| Installing Software | Different ways to install software on the Pi 5 |
| df snap pollution | Replace df with dysk |
| Ollama GUI | Running Large Language Models on the Pi 5 |
| Many software articles are planned. Stay tuned! | |