EDATEC Aims to Tame the Heat with Its New Passive Cooling Cases for the Raspberry Pi 5

Embedded electronics specialist EDATEC has launched two cases for the new Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer (SBC), designed to lessen the likelihood of thermal throttling without the noise or reliability concerns of an active fan — cooling the device entirely passively.

EDATEC's initial case offerings for the Raspberry Pi 5, brought to our attention by CNX Software, do more than protect the board. The company has unveiled two designs, both of which are CNC milled from aluminum and connect to hot-running parts of the board — in order to bleed excess heat off passively, without having to connect anything to the Raspberry Pi 5's new fan header.

Early models of Raspberry Pi were able to run at their full speed simply as a bare board, but as the performance of successive designs has increased so too has the power required to run them — with the latest and most powerful model, the Raspberry Pi 5, hitting its thermal throttle point in around 40 seconds of stress-testing. Raspberry Pi itself has launched two accessories to address this, a plastic case with integrated fan and an aluminum cooler with blower — both of which introduce moving parts into the mix.

EDATEC's designs, by contrast, rely on passive cooling. The first is the ED-Pi5Case-B and -S, indicating a black and silver finish respectively, which is an enclosed case design covering the entirety of the board. A full-size silicone sheet transfers heat from the bottom of the Raspberry Pi 5's PCB to a large aluminum base, while smaller targeted pads do the same for the system-on-chip and power management circuitry to the upper lid.

The ED-Pi5Case-OB and -OS, by contrast, use a two-layer rounded open-frame design which keeps the sides free from obstruction. According to EDATEC, this reduces the case's weight compared to the full-coverage variant — but less aluminum also means less cooling performance, with the board delivering a claimed 15°C reducing in board temperature to a 20-25°C drop for the closed version.

Both cases provide cutouts to access the Raspberry Pi 5's general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, two MIPI Camera Serial Interface/Display Serial Interface (DSI/CSI) ports, Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) header, and PCI Express connector, with the open-frame version also providing cutouts for the real-time clock (RTC) battery, debug UART, and fan headers. The closed-frame version also provides a plastic window to the side of the board's PCB antenna — to avoid the metal harming reception, the company explains.

Both board variants are now available on EDATAC's AliExpress store, priced at $18 for the closed-frame and $10 for the open-frame variants respectively — though this excludes a hefty shipping fee which roughly doubles the price.