raspberry-pi 10 days ago ◯ 4 min read

Raspberry Pi 5 Case and Cooling Upgrades: Argon ONE V3 vs Pironman 5 vs the Official Active Cooler

raspberry pi 5argon one v3pironman 5active coolernvmecase comparisoncoolingpcie

The Raspberry Pi 5's PCIe lane opened the door to real NVMe storage and real cooling demands at the same time, and a small ecosystem of aftermarket cases has grown around both problems. Two of the most capable options — Argon40's Argon ONE V3 and SunFounder's Pironman 5 — take very different approaches to the same goals: keep the CPU cool, add an NVMe drive without eating your USB ports, and make the thing look like it belongs on a desk rather than in a drawer. This guide compares them against each other and against just running the official Active Cooler, and covers what to actually check before you buy either.

Argon ONE V3: Compact and NVMe-First

NVMe: takes M.2 NVMe drives up to 2280 size (M-Key), wired directly to the Pi 5's PCIe socket — unlike the earlier V2 design, all four USB-A ports stay free. The drive sits under a removable base cover with its own aluminum heatsink and thermal pad, so you can swap the drive without opening the rest of the case.
Cooling: an aluminum-alloy case body provides passive cooling via two silicone thermal pads contacting the CPU and PMIC, backed by a redesigned 30mm PWM blower fan. In a 15-minute stress test, idle temperature ran around 54°C versus 65°C on an uncooled Pi 5, with the fan kicking in near 60°C and holding around 61°C under sustained load — comfortably below the Pi 5's 80°C throttling point.
Ports: two full-size HDMI ports, Ethernet, four USB-A ports, USB-C power, and a 3.5mm audio jack (restoring one the Pi 5 board itself dropped), plus a built-in IR receiver. The GPIO header is repositioned under a magnetic top flap with a printed pinout guide.
Trade-off: the microSD slot is buried and requires opening the case to access — plan on booting from the NVMe drive or installing over the network rather than swapping SD cards regularly.
Power/fan control: an onboard RP2040 microcontroller manages fan speed and the case's power button, with jumper pins on the daughterboard for configuration.

Pironman 5: Tower Cooling and a Status Display

Form factor: a tower-style case (112 × 78.5 × 117 mm) with an aluminum frame and clear acrylic side panels — the opposite philosophy from the Argon ONE's flat, compact footprint. It's built to look like a miniature desktop tower, not to disappear behind a monitor.
Cooling: three 40mm fans total — a PWM tower cooler over the CPU/PMIC, plus two rear RGB fans. The default profile ramps the main fan to about 33% (roughly 1,000 RPM) at 50°C and 50% (about 2,000 RPM) at 60°C, when the rear RGB fans also kick in. In testing at around 18°C room temperature under a sustained four-core stress test, CPU temperature stayed below 61°C while holding the Pi 5's full 2.4 GHz clock.
NVMe: an M.2 slot (2230–2280) via a separate NVMe board. Over the Pi's default PCIe Gen 2 link it measured around 468 MB/s sequential read in testing; forcing Gen 3 (via dtparam=pciex1_gen=3 in config.txt) nearly doubled that to around 926 MB/s — but note that Raspberry Pi's own documentation does not officially support Gen 3 on this hardware, so treat that as an unsupported overclock, not a guaranteed result.
Display and lighting: a small OLED screen (connected via an IO extender board) shows live system stats, and the rear fans plus addressable RGB LEDs add lighting that the Argon ONE doesn't attempt at all.
Software: requires installing SunFounder's pironman5 module from GitHub to enable the OLED display and RGB control — this is a manual software setup step, not a plug-and-play feature.
Trade-off: at roughly $80 (on top of the Pi 5 itself), it's pricier than the Argon ONE V3, and SunFounder's own documentation notes that add-on HATs like the official AI HAT will physically conflict with the tower cooler, NVMe board, and IO extender stack — this case is not a good match if you're also planning to add a HAT.

Head-to-Head

Argon ONE V3Pironman 5Official Active Cooler (bare)Form factorFlat, compactVertical towerNo case, heatsink + fan onlyNVMe supportYes, 2280, direct PCIeYes, 2230–2280, via add-on boardNoUSB ports freed upAll 4 stay usableAll 4 stay usableAll 4 stay usableDisplayNoneOLED system statsNoneRGB lightingNoneYes, rear fans + LEDsNonemicroSD accessHidden, needs disassemblyExtended, accessibleNative, accessibleHAT compatibilityBetter (less stacked hardware)Limited, conflicts with tower stackBestApprox. extra costLower~$80+Lowest (official accessory)

Which One Should You Actually Buy

If you want NVMe boot and better-than-stock cooling in the smallest possible footprint, and you don't care about a display or RGB, the Argon ONE V3 is the simpler, cheaper choice — and the direct PCIe wiring to the drive (versus going through an add-on board) is a genuinely cleaner design. If you want a desk-visible status display, more aggressive tower cooling margin, and don't mind the larger footprint and higher price, the Pironman 5 is more capable, but go in knowing you'll likely need to run it without the official AI HAT or other add-on boards stacked alongside it. If your workload doesn't need NVMe at all — a headless Pi-hole or home automation box, say — the official Active Cooler alone is still the lowest-friction option: it keeps every port and the microSD slot fully accessible and needs zero extra software setup.

Whichever route you take, remember that forcing PCIe Gen 3 speeds on either NVMe solution is running outside Raspberry Pi's official support envelope — stable for many users in practice, but worth knowing before you build a storage-critical project around that bandwidth figure.