In the market for a stylish case for your Raspberry Pi 5? With aluminum and clear acrylic panels, the SunFounder Pironman 5 case transforms the Raspberry Pi 5 into a beautiful desktop mini PC with optional NMVe storage. The Pironman 5 ticks all the boxes: design, construction, cooling, NVMe slot, full size HDMI ports, even an RTC battery. I’ve tested the case over the last couple of weeks. Here’s my findings.
What’s in the box?
The Pironman 5 ships as a DIY kit. Everything you need to assemble the case is supplied including assembly tools (screwdriver and a mini cross wrench). The key components provided:
- Main case components (top, bottom, sides) – aluminum and acrylic plates.
- Tower cooler with PWM fan.
- 2 x RGB 40mm fans with dust filters.
- 0.96-inch OLED module.
- Various daughterboards including an NVMe M.2 SSD board, USB HDMI Adapter, and an IO expander.
- Screws, standoffs and cables.
- Retro power button.
- RTC battery.
- Assembly instructions.
Note, the Raspberry Pi 5 is not provided with the case. You’ll also need a power supply. The optional NVMe drive is not provided.
We evaluated the Pironman 5 with a Raspberry Pi 5 4GB RAM and a Samsung SSD 980 1TB M.2 NVMe.
Assembling the Pironman 5
There’s a lot of assembly needed but the included instruction sheet succinctly explains each of the 27 steps. There’s also an online tutorial but the instruction sheet is all I needed.
Given the number of parts you get, I spent the first 5 minutes doing an inventory, but that probably wasn’t necessary.
Think of the assembly as a mini project in itself. It’s actually quite straightforward and fun to do; much like many Raspberry Pi 5 projects. And thoughtfully there are even spare parts included such as extra ribbon cables, foam pads and small screws. Everything is labelled.
The assembly took me about 75 minutes. Some of the screws are a little fiddly but time was saved by using my own magnetic screwdriver.
Build Quality
I am genuinely impressed in this department. When assembled, the case looks rather luxurious and as good as many gaming PCs albeit a fraction of their size. Of course, the Raspberry Pi 5 is not capable of running AAA games.
The 0.96” OLED Display displays the Raspberry Pi’s CPU usage, temperature, disk usage, IP address, and RAM usage. It’s a useful addition. I also like the full size HDMI ports, and the retro power button (which is so much better than the Pi 5’s own power button).
The attention to detail is first class. For example, the acrylic plates have protective paper to avoid scratching in transit, and the fans come provided with dust filters. The RTC battery is a welcome touch particularly as we’re planning to see how the machine runs as a NAS. You don’t want to use a system as a backup server if it relies solely on the internet to get the time.
Given that all the functionality of the Pi is still available, you probably will never want to take the Pi out of the case. But if you do, it’ll take some time!
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Assembly
Page 2 – Software
Page 3 – Cooling
Page 4 – Disk Performance
Page 5 – WiFi Performance
Page 6 – Summary
All articles in this series:
| Raspberry Pi 5 Series | |
|---|---|
Hardware | |
| iRasptek Starter Kit | All the kit you need to get started with the Pi 5 |
| Pironman 5 Case Review | Transform the Pi 5 into a beautiful desktop mini PC |
| Passive Cooling the Pi 5 | Passively cool your Pi 5 the right way. Silent yet cool |
| Benchmarking | Benchmarking the Pi 5 against an Intel N100 mini PC |
| Overclocking | Let's increase the clock speed of the BCM2712 SoC |
| Power Consumption | Compare the power consumption of the Pi 5 with Intel Mini PCs |
Configuration | |
| raspi-config | Useful text-based tool to configure the Pi 5 |
| PiGro | GUI tool that streamlines the process of managing the Pi 5 |
| Increase Swap Memory Size | Increase the swap size from 512MB to 2GB |
| ZRAM swapdrive | Simple script to use a ZRAM swapdrive instead of a swapfile |
Software | |
| Installing Software | Different ways to install software on the Pi 5 |
| df snap pollution | Replace df with dysk |
| Many software articles are planned. Stay tuned! | |