Raspberry Pi 5 Active Cooler

The official Raspberry Pi 5 Active Cooler is a dedicated cooling solution designed specifically for the Raspberry Pi 5. It uses an aluminium heatsink along with a temperature-controlled blower fan to keep Raspberry Pi 5 at a reduced operating temperature under heavy loads.

Specs

Input voltage 5V DC supplied via four-pin fan header on Raspberry Pi 5
Fan speed control Pulse width modulation control with tachometer
Maximum airflow 1.09 CFM
Maximum fan speed 8000 RPM +/- 15%
Material Anodised aluminium
MTTF 379,000 hours at 25℃
Production lifetime Will remain in production until at least January 2036

Install the cooler

Here are the steps to install the cooler:

  1. Remove the paper from the thermal pads on the bottom side.
  2. Make sure your Raspberry Pi 5 is powered off. Position the Active Cooler carefully in the correct space on Raspberry Pi 5, making sure not to hit any of the connectors.
  3.  Align the two white push pins with the two dedicated heatsink holes.
  4. Press evenly on the tops of the two push pins simultaneously until they click.
  5. Connect the fan cable to the connector labelled FAN on Raspberry Pi 5.
  6. It is not recommended to remove the cooler once it is fitted to Raspberry Pi 5. Removal of the Active Cooler will cause the push pins and thermal pads to degrade and is likely to lead to product damage

 

We can test the usefulness of the devices by increasing the CPU load using the stress command. Install stress with the following command:

sudo apt install stress -y

Run the test:

stress --cpu 4 --timeout 600 &

We can get temperture info using the watch command. Before applying the cooler, the temperature maxes out at 86°C:

watch -n 1 vcgencmd measure_temp

Every 1.0s: vcgencmd measure_temp raspberrypi: Sun Mar 15 09:43:11 2026
temp=84.0'C

After applying the active cooler, the temperature stays at about 54°C:

Every 1.0s: vcgencmd measure_temp raspberrypi: Sun Mar 15 10:05:57 2026
temp=54.9'C

 

The fan is not very loud – even under heavy usage, the noise was only about 40 dB.

Buy now

You can get the cooler from Amazon.

Further reading

Official PDF

Mechanical drawing

Geek University 2022