Answering Your Pi 5 Questions | Cooling, Overclocking, Power and More

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Hey all, we saw some commonly asked questions floating around about power, cooling, and overclocking the new Pi 5, so we did a little sleuthing and answered some of them: “Answering Your Pi 5 Questions | Cooling, Overclocking, Power and More”



If you have any more questions, feel free to ask below and we will answer as best as we can!
Cheers!

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I’d be interested to see how well the new Pi can utilise the two 4-lane CSI ports. Any chance of plugging in a pair of 4-lane TC358743 HDMI adapters and seeing how it performs as a H264 stream encoder?

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Raspberry Pi 5 - Out of Stock. hmmm

Might be a while before I have any serious questions.
But thanks for the guide.

Jim

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Hey Andrew,

That is a great use for the Pis that I haven’t even seen till now!

I think you may run into a few issues there trying to encode 2 separate video inputs. There will probably be more than enough bandwidth through MIPI - no issue there, but the Pi 5 is missing h264 hardware encoding (bit unfortunate). This is all done software side now and although it smashes the Pi 4 in terms of software-based encoding, I don’t think it will be enough to perform it on 2 inputs at once at a decent fps.

Jaryd

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Hey Jim,

As of right now, the Pi 5 hasn’t been officially released yet. We aren’t taking pre-orders for the Raspberry Pi 5 until we’ve confirmed what stock is available, but you can click the “sign up to be notified” link on the Pi 5 product page and we’ll send you an alert as soon as we can take your order.

-Jaryd

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Oh wow, I didn’t even consider that there might not be hardware H264 encoding on the Pi 5. I was hoping for some extra headroom to play with but with software encoding performance might actually regress.

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Yeah, it is a bit of a shame, think it was to help keep down the costs a little. Hopefully, someone figures out a workaround, or we just hope the Pi 6 is fast enough to effectively software encode ahahahah.

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I shutdown my Raspberry Pi 5 but left it connected to power (with red light on). The next morning, the heatsink was still hot. Is that normal?

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Hi,

For the heatsink to still be hot it sounds like it wasn’t quite off. Have you used it since?

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Yes. It’s always like that. The OS is shutdown and red light showing on device but heat sink is warm (not hot but warm). If I remove the power supply then it goes cold. I didn’t think I would need to physically detach the power supply on a Pi 5.

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Hey C,

That is very odd, what heatsink have you got on it? I’m wondering if the power management next to the USB runs warm while the board is off, but I don’t think it would be that warm. Does your heatsink cover this? Also what power supply are you using?

I have just plugged one in and turned it off, will let it sit for a few hours and check it with the thermal camera.

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I’m using the active cooler which is the fan and heatsink together. I’m using the Pi4 power supply which Core Electronics said was fine to use on a Pi5.

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I also used the Pi 4 PSU and it was room temperature. How hot is warm in this case, just a ballpark number?

If you remove the SD card does it still get warm? Just trying to eliminate any OS or software side issues.

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Maybe 20 degrees celsius. I’ve removed the SD card but no difference.

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We have just put on of our Pi 5s to the test. Our temp gun reads 50 degrees on the cpu and the pd power chip. It isn’t a fault with your board.

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What temperature are they when they are powered off ?

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That is with our board powered off. I have just come across a post on Raspberry Pi’s forum where temps are being discussed. It is wide enough spread for me to believe its normal.

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Has anyone measured how much current the Pi 5 is drawing when shutdown ??

Tested my Pi 4 and when shutdown about 200mA (1W). When running and idle about 400mA.
To me this is way too much power to be consuming when supposed to be off.
Another reason I choose a microcontroller (Pico, Arduino) over a microcomputer (Pi).

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Hi James,

If I had a Pi 5 here with me I would also measure it but as I don’t I have done a little bit of research.

The Pi 5 has a larger current draw when powered off using up to 1.6W. That article also goes through and discusses some fixes that can be implemented.

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@Jack Thanks for the link, Jeff Geerling puts out some excellent stuff.

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