The Pi 5 was announced just a few weeks ago, and whilst there is a wealth of information available about the board, we kept seeing some common questions popping up in the community, so today we're going to try and answer a few of them.

Coming in with our first question, does the Pi 5 need cooling? The Pi 5 runs hotter than its predecessor, so it's no surprise that we've seen many questions relating to the cooling needs of the new board. I don't know why you'd want to run it without any cooling whatsoever, but to answer this, we performed some tests without a heatsink or fans or anything attached to keep it cool. We did some general web browsing, some YouTube and simulated day-to-day usage, and after a few minutes, the temps were in the 70-80C range, and it wasn't long before we encountered some periodic thermal throttling. We performed a 30-minute stress barrier, and as you can see, the results are not too great, the Pi 5 thermal throttling in under 1 minute of heavy use.

So yes, you can technically get away without a cooling solution just for general day-to-day usage, but running it hot all the time like this is going to really reduce the lifespan, and you probably won't be able to get any meaningful overclocks on it. I think it is definitely worth at least getting a passive heatsink or the active cooler, they're only a few dollars extra, and they will extend the life of your Pi greatly.

And that leads us into our next question, how does it run with just a passive cooler? We ran the same usage tests, but this time with the official active cooler, but with the fan removed, and we also did these tests on a more generic low-profile heatsink. The Pi 5 performed far better with these, and it would stick it around theMid-60C with no thermal throttling whatsoever. We also ran a stress barrier for the active cooler, no fan setup, and found that it took about 10 minutes of heavy load usage to start thermal throttling.

So the Pi 5 can happily run with just a decent passive cooler in day-to-day usage. It was a tad hotter, about 10-degrees overall, but for the same reasons as before, a few extra dollars for the active cooler might be a worthwhile investment. I really do sound like a salesman for the active cooler here, but it just does such a good job.

Speaking of the active cooler, how loud is it? A lot of the reasons for using passive cooling is when you need complete silence with very little fan whirring in the background. We don't have a sound meter on hand to give you the exact decibel reading of noise, but we can comparatively paint you a picture of just how quiet this thing is.

Under day-to-day usage, just web browsing, a little bit of media playback, nothing too intense, the fan is almost silent. If you hold it up to your ear when it's spinning at these low speeds, it is a struggle to hear it even in a dead silent room. I'm going to hold it up to the microphone so you can kind of gauge how loud this thing is. This is that first really quiet setting that I'm talking about. Even if we overclock it and put it under some decently heavy loads, we spin it up to the point where you can hear it, but it's still really quiet. It's about as loud as a ticking watch or as quiet as you can possibly whisper.

Another common set of questions we saw were relating to the overclocking capabilities of the board, with the biggest one being, how does it overclock? We were able to get a stable CPU overclock of about 3GHz and 1GHz on the GPU. We encounteredNo issues or instabilities even after two days of usage at these clock speeds. We also performed a 16-hour stress test and had no issues there either. Whilst these numbers are subject to the silicon lottery, I'd say that you can expect most Pi-5s to be able to achieve these stable clocks very easily.

An interesting thing, however, is that the Pi-5 won't currently let you clock past 3GHz. If you set something higher than that in the config file, it just kind of ignores it. This seems to be some lower level limitation and hopefully it will be lifted as I think you can squeeze a little bit more out of this board speed-wise.

How much faster is it when it's overclocked? It seems to scale nice and linearly with clock speed on the Pi-5. 3GHz is about 25% faster than 2.4GHz speed-wise and after running some Sysbench primes and Speedometer 2.1 benchmarks, we found about a 25% increase in performance.

What cooling does it need when overclocked? We ran all of our overclocking tests with the official Active Cooler and it did a really great job of keeping it cool. As you can see from the results of our 16-hour Stressbury tests, it didn't even reach 70-degrees and only runs about 10-degrees warmer than the standard clock across the board. Plenty of headroom to spare.

With the new Pi-5 comes a new power supply, but can it run on the old Pi-4's power supply? From just a surface look, the Pi-5 seems to be able to perform with the old 5V 3A power supply with the new power supply being 5.15A. We ran a Sysbench Prime, Speedometer and a Quake 3 time demo and saw no significant differences in benchmark performances, even when overclocked. However, this should be taken with a grain of salt as this is just a surface level look.

Raspberry Pi has stated that you may encounter some problems with using a lesser power supply on the Pi-5, a decent point considering that we're not charging phones here, we're powering small computers and we need to do so reliably.

There is also the major factor that you won't be able to pull a full 1.6A through the USB ports without the new power supply, you'll be stuck at 600mA which you can't really run a USB powered SSD off. That and that there are many accessories not released yet that may make use of this extra power on the new supply.

Another power related question, is the Pi-5 more power efficient than the Pi-4? The Pi-5 is faster than the 4, but also chews through much more power. How much does the increase in speed outweigh the increase in power?

If you've seen our comparison video or any benchmark video or article, you would know that under synthetic benchmarks, the Pi-5 is about 50% faster and about 2-3 times quicker in more real world benchmarks than the 4, so we picked a benchmark from each category to make this efficiency comparison.

Without any displays or peripherals plugged in, we ran Sysbench primes for 250,000 operations which took the 5 about 60 seconds to complete and took the 4 about 90 seconds. In terms of power usage, the Pi-5 came in at about 20% more efficient with it using 88mWh of power to complete it, over the Pi-4 taking 112mWh of power.

For our more real world tests, we booted up Speedometer which is a benchmark that simulates some web browsing. The Pi-5 came in at 136mWh to complete it, and the 4 came in at 282mWh.

So on synthetic tests, the Pi-5 is about 30% more efficient than the 4, and in more real world tests, about twice as efficient in terms of power consumption to complete the exact.Same task. A missing in action feature of the Pi-5 is that 3.5mm audio composite jack, and no surprise, the two comments we have seen over and over again is, how do I get audio out of it and how do I get composite out of it now?

First off, audio can be sourced from Bluetooth or HDMI, but for those who want a dedicated physical connection, an inexpensive USB to 3.5mm audio jack can be purchased, just make sure it's female 3.5mm and male USB. If you aren't satisfied with a USB solution or want something a little bit more specky, there are also DAC HATs available.

For the rare breed of makers that still use composite video, we're looking at UCRT Gaming Community, you'll be pleased to know that it is still readily available on the Pi-5. It was widely reported on launch that the composite video has been removed, however there is a tiny two terminal pin out hidden away between the MIPI and HDMI connectors. It is now a little bit of an extra hurdle to get composite video out, but at least it's still possible.

And finally, can it GPT? We saw an abnormally large amount of questions asking this for some reason. We saw a lot of genuine applications of this for people who are off the grid with no internet and limited power, where running a large language model like ChatGPT would be great for something like a Pi.

We attempted to get GPT for all and Mistral 7B running on the Pi-5, but we were not successful. We have however seen some people get these working on the Pi-4's, and if we extrapolate the performance to the Pi-5, it's still not great. A 1000 word essay written at a GPT 3.5 equivalent looks like it will take hours to generate on the Pi-5. Maybe that PCI slot could be used to make this viable, who knows, but for now II think it's quicker to write my own uni assignments than to let a Pi-5 do it for me. Well, I hope that at least answered one of the questions you had about the Pi-5.

If you still have any more, chuck it in the comments below, or head over to our forums. We're all makers, and we are happy to help.

Till next time.