Key Takeaways
- Raspberry Pi 5 project showcases water-cooled SBC with hard tubing for aesthetic appeal.
- Retro3dfx, the creator, used a Pi 5 water block from Seeed Studio and plans to control fan and pump speed via Arduino.
- While effective, water cooling may not be necessary for an overclocked Pi 5, as air cooling can achieve similar results.
Sometimes a project doesn’t need to be revolutionary, ground-breaking, or even useful. Sometimes, the goal of completing something that nobody else has done is its own reward. Keep this in mind as we dive into a recent Raspberry Pi 5 project posted on Reddit that shows off a water-cooled SBC with hard tubing, because if anything, it looks really cool.
Related
Raspberry Pi 5 review: The holy grail of DIY projects got even better (and rarer)
The Raspberry Pi 5 is one of the most powerful consumer-grade SBCs out there. Sadly, its limited stock means you’ll have a hard time finding one.
Adding water cooling to a Raspberry Pi 5
This feat was performed by retro3dfx on Reddit, who made a post on the Raspberry Pi subreddit about their feat. It’s still a work in progress; retro3dfx states that they haven’t gotten around to coding the Arduino to control the fan and pump speed. However, everything else appears to be in order, which creates this really cool-looking SBC.
Commenters arrived in the thread asking if the original poster did this out of necessity or for fun. The poster stated that there was zero need for all this, but they just wanted to see if it could be done. They did reveal that the Pi 5 water block was from Seeed Studio, so if you want to follow in their footsteps, there’s that.
So, the million-dollar question: does it actually cool down the SBC? In a comment, retro3dfx explained that he did a sustained 3GHz overclock on the Pi 5, and it achieved temps “hardly over 40C under full load.” However, they do admit that you could just as easily keep an overclocked Pi 5 cool by using air cooling.
If this is your first time reading about the Raspberry Pi, don’t worry; they’re not always this crazy. You’d be better off checking the beginner’s guide to Raspberry Pi programming and these simple projects for beginners instead of wondering how someone squeezed water cooling on something the size of a credit card.