When I bought the original Raspberry Pi all those years ago, it never even crossed my mind that it would need some form of active cooling, or that it would make any difference. However, as every generation of Pi gains more powerful CPU and GPU cores, and increases the total number of those cores, physics inevitably catches up.
This is why, if you want to use a modern Raspberry Pi as a personal computer rather than a job-specific hobby board, you need to upgrade its cooling.
Why cooling is the Pi's biggest hidden performance bottleneck
The first thing that I have to make clear is that it's perfectly safe to run a Raspberry Pi, even the latest Raspberry, without any active cooling. They are designed to be used this way, and in many projects being passively cooled is an important feature.
The latest Raspberry Pi 5 is an impressively powerful computer , however. It's capable of performance levels that it's passive cooling limit can't sustain. So, if you push the CPU without an active cooler, the only way to control the temperature is to slow things down. The limit on the latest Pi is 85C before throttling happens.
Sydney Louw Butler/How-To Geek
Even light multitasking will eventually push temperatures to the throttling point, as will running a single heavier app that has a sustained workload. Now, this might not actually be a problem, depending on what it is you're doing. After all, even throttled, the Pi might still have more than enough performance to do what you need. But for for typical use as a desktop PC the way most people use it, you'll feel the drag.
What an active heatsink cooler actually changes
In my case, I bought the official cooler for the Pi 5, which costs a mere ten bucks. The cooler consists of an aluminum heatsink with a fan cooler. It draws heat not only from the SoC (System-on-a-Chip), but also from important surrounding components.
It's not just about that fan either. The addition of a (relatively) large aluminum heatsink significantly increases the passive cooling power of your system. Without the fan kicking in, it now takes much longer for the passive cooling element to reach saturation. The cooling fins also improve heat exchange with the surrounding air.
The fan speeds up this process by blowing air actively through those fins, but it doesn't have to kick in as soon as you might expect, and it doesn't have to run at high speeds to maintain a good temperature while doing everyday tasks.
The installation process is simple and instantly rewarding
Not only was this upgrade very cheap, installation literally takes a few seconds. All you have to do is peel off some tape to expose the heat pads, line up the pins with those on the board and carefully push them in to secure the heatsink.
Sydney Louw Butler / How-To Geek
Then just plug the fansink in to the fan header, and you're done. The only downside here is that the official cooler, and perhaps especially some third-party cooler designs, might make your Pi incompatible with certain cases. I use a 3D-printed case with ventilation that complements the active cooler, while keeping everything insulated and safe.
Sydney Louw Butler/How-To Geek
How the Pi suddenly felt like a usable everyday desktop
I've hooked my Raspberry Pi up to my rolling TV setup. Something I created to test things for work, but also to serve as a big mobile workstation, gaming solution, and whatever else I need.
Sydney Louw Butler / How-To Geek
By putting it on the back of the TV (I'm still thinking about how I want to permanently attach it), I've effectively created an awesome rolling Linux PC that I can also rapidly turn into a retro gaming solution or an HTPC by just swapping out an SD card.
Sydney Louw Butler/How-To Geek
I tried this without active cooling and without a case, and you can definitely notice the difference, but in the below video from It's FOSS you can clearly see how the idle temperatures of the Pi drop from 70C to the lower 50s as soon as you plug it in.
Which is impressive, but the important thing is that with the active cooler your Pi will never reach its throttling temperature under load. So you can use it like a normal computer, or even apply it to things like being a media server that has to do sustained transcoding.
Why every power user should consider this cheap upgrade
From my point of view, this upgrade is so cheap, so easy, and so fast to do with such a massive return that I need to think up reasons why not to do it. There are only a few I can come up with. First, if you are going to use your Pi as a naked board for some sort of headless maker project , it probably doesn't need active cooling. If you want to use it inside another device where it just wouldn't fit with a cooler, that's another reason. Also, even though the standard cooler is pretty inaudible, any project that requires absolute silence is also out. Though you can still attach a large passive cooler in those cases.
So, why not? Why shouldn't you unlock all your Raspberry Pi's performance?
