It depends what youre about to do with it. Its recomended at least a heatsink. If the temp gets to high the CPU will just trottle and the preformance get bad
"Its recomended at least a heatsink."
"recomended" (sic) by whom?
Not by Raspberry Pi themselves. See the News Blog post cited in the reply preceding yours -
Conclusions
For normal use adding cooling is optional, although performance may be improved with the addition of active cooling. However a heavy continuous load, such as rebuilding the Linux kernel, will force the new Raspberry Pi 5 into thermal throttling. For heavy loads thermal throttling can extend processing times, and passive cooling is probably going to be insufficient thermal management for heavy loads that extend beyond 200 or 300 seconds of duration, with active cooling necessary to prevent thermal throttling from occurring.
When deciding on a cooling solution you should consider what sort of use you’re going to put your Raspberry Pi 5 to, and make a decision on cooling based on that, rather than just arbitrarily adding cooling. Because for a lot of day-to-day use cases, it’s not going to be needed.
Cooling of any type isn’t mandatory, no harm will come to your Raspberry Pi if it’s left uncooled — and even while throttling under heavy load, a Raspberry Pi 5 is still faster than an unthrottled Raspberry Pi 4.
Also, see the Raspberry Pi Official Documentation on this topic -
Frequency management and thermal control - https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentati ... al-control
Statistics: Posted by B.Goode — Sat Jun 28, 2025 7:20 am