Raspberry Pi 5 Benchmarks: Significantly Better Performance, Improved I/O

With the Raspberry Pi 4 a moderate passive heatsink or even active cooling is recommended. With Raspberry Pi 5, adequate cooling is even more important with the higher-clocked and faster Cortex-A76 cores.

Along with the Raspberry Pi 5 review sample, the Raspberry Pi crew also included their new Raspberry Pi Cooler for testing with the RPi 5. For those questioning the cooling needs, I ran some benchmarks of the Raspberry Pi 5 stock and then with this active cooler installed:

The Raspberry Pi 5 performed significantly better with the active cooler installed, to little surprise.

Without any heatsink, the Raspberry Pi 5 SoC had an 81 degree average and a peak of 89 degrees. When installing the active cooler, the SoC temperature under the same set of benchmarks was 56 degrees with a peak of just 72 degrees.

The active cooling allowed the Raspberry Pi 5 to stay at 2.4GHz consistently throughout all of the benchmarks being conducted.