Best Raspberry Pi Coolers of 2026

The Armor Lite V5 is the Pi 5 cooler for someone who looked at the official Active Cooler and wanted more metal. The aluminum heatsink is visibly chunkier, and the 3510 PWM fan sits on top rather than inside a low shroud. At 55 grams, it has more mass to absorb heat before the fan has to work harder, which is the whole point of a bigger cooler.

We liked the fan control more than the size. The 3510 fan is rated at 16.6 dB, and it supports PWM through Raspberry Pi OS, so it stays in its low range for ordinary work and ramps only when the board heats up. The package includes a screwdriver, two screws, and four thermal pads; the extra pads let you cover more than just the SoC, which is a nice touch at this end of the market. The fit is the part to check: the bigger heatsink can foul the official Pi 5 case, so measure before you commit.

In a larger case or an open-frame build, that trade-off disappears. The Armor Lite gives you a more substantial cooler for a Pi 5 without turning the build into a tower. If your case is tight, stay with the official cooler; if you have room, this is the upgrade we point to.

The ICE PEAK is the budget end of the Pi 5 cooler market, and it makes its case with a low-profile shape rather than a tower. It uses a 3510 PWM fan and a low-profile heatsink, and the fan connects directly to the Pi 5's header. That simple recipe is exactly what a lot of Pi 5 owners need: active cooling without a custom bracket.

We installed it with the two screws and the pre-applied thermal material, and the low profile was the part we appreciated most. It left room for a HAT and an NVMe board in the stack we were building, which is the point of a low-profile cooler. The fan follows the Pi OS temperature curve, so it stays quiet during light work and ramps when the CPU warms. Under a sustained load, we could hear it, but it wasn't a whine; it was a small fan doing its job.

This isn't the cooler for an overclocked Pi 5 or a build that lives under a full-time compute load. It's the budget pick for a normal desktop, a media player, or a project where the board needs moving air and nothing more. At the price, that's a useful thing to have.

The ICE Tower is unapologetically big, and on a Pi 4 that's the point. The copper heat pipes pull heat out of the SoC and into a stack of aluminum fins, and the 2200 rpm fan pushes air through the tower rather than just stirring it around the case. We like it for the boards that actually need that kind of headroom: an overclocked Pi 4, a 3D-printer controller, or a machine that runs a long job with the lid off.

The RGB fan is the divisive part. It cycles through colors and gives the build a very visible personality; if you want a stealthy Pi, this isn't it. The fan can be powered from the Pi's 5V rail, so you don't need a separate supply, and the tower is rated at 50 dB at full speed. In our testing, it was quiet at low speed and only made itself known when the board was working hard, which is the trade-off you accept for the cooling headroom.

Height is the other catch. The tower needs open space above the board, and it won't fit inside a low-profile case without cutting or leaving the lid off. For a Pi 4 in a workshop or a bench build, that's an easy trade. For a compact media center, it's the wrong shape entirely.

Push pins are the first thing we notice on the Argon THRML. The black aluminum heatsink uses a tunnel fin design, and the 30mm blower sits inside the fin stack rather than on top of it. There are no screws in the mount: the pins press into the Pi 5's holes, which makes the cooler easy to lift for a board swap or a HAT change.

The blower is the other design detail. A 30mm PWM fan pushes air through the tunnel instead of blowing down onto the fins, and it follows the Pi's temperature curve. In our testing, the push pins held it firmly and the fan stayed in the background during light work. We didn't measure sound levels, but it didn't become the loudest part of the build.

What we like most is the combination of the tool-free mount and the black finish: it's the cleaner-looking install of the Pi 5 coolers here. The catch is that the official Active Cooler is the safer default for a first build. The THRML is for the builder who values the push-pin mount and wants a cooler that disappears into the board.

A bag of stick-on heatsinks is not going to turn a Pi 5 into a fanless workstation, and the Easycargo kit doesn't pretend to. You get 15 aluminum heatsinks and 5 copper ones, all with pre-applied thermal tape, sized for the Pi's main chips and the smaller controllers around the board. The point is flexibility: you can add a little metal where a fan won't fit, or supplement a board that already has active cooling.

The larger aluminum sinks are the ones we used on the SoC, and the copper pieces are handy for memory and controller chips. The tape is easy to place and doesn't need a clamp, which makes the kit a low-commitment way to experiment. The catch is that it's passive: on a Pi 5 running a sustained load, it won't keep up with even a small active cooler.

What we like is the price-to-flexibility ratio. This is the kit for a Pi 4 doing light work, a Pi 5 in a project where a fan is impossible, or a board that needs a little extra help around the RAM and USB controller. For a main Pi 5 cooler, spend the money on active airflow; for everything else, this bag earns its place in the drawer.