Pironman 5 Review

The Pironman 5 is a case for the Raspberry Pi 5 that makes it look like a cute little gaming PC, adjustable RGB light and all. It features full-size HDMI ports, a built-in OLED status display, a fan and an M.2 SSD slot. There’s also a slot to access the GPIO on the side.

I’m mostly using my Raspberry Pi 5 as a a server for Pi-hole and HomeBridge, as a NAS and for some other nerd shenanigans.

This means that my Pi is running all the time, and that also reveals this case’s biggest issue: the OLED screen has severe burn-in, especially since the software is designed to show essentially the same content for weeks and months on end.

Aside from the OLED burn-in issue, the case is… fine. My Pi runs stable and cool. I’ve been booting from the SSD without any issues, running for over a year. The micro SD card slot is only used for extra, interchangeable storage.

Putting this thing together was quite a project. Part of that is the fact that it really comes in a lot of individual pieces, part of it is that those pieces don’t quite fit together. As a result, the large (by Raspberry Pi standards) fan sits at an angle, but that doesn’t seem to affect its cooling quality.

The software that’s used for the display and light/fan controls is also… fine. A few times I noticed that it was the largest CPU user on my Pi. This might also show how efficient my DNS and everything is, but it’s ironic that the software that’s supposed to show CPU usage is the largest CPU user…

Overall, the verdict is a bit 😑, but this thing is generally functional.