Orange Pi 5 Plus Case with Cooling Fan, Metal Case with Fan Heatsinks Compatible with Orange Pi 5 Plus 4GB/8GB/16GB

It is a nice case for the Orange Pi. Liked how well it fit the the Orange pi.

Note: lots of people have complained that this case is not good for WiFi ... that you have to drill holes etc. Nope, not true. You shouldn't just assume things ... you should actually test them! I installed the Orange Pi WiFi 6 card and attached the antennas and left the antennas inside the case, just resting on top of the main board and then I tested it and voilà I saw good signal strength to my WiFi box. The case has many holes in it, which prove to be adequate for the radio signal to get through. Yes the signal would be stronger with external antennas but it was strong enough for my needs. ============== I took a star off because the Orange Pi 5 Plus comes with a PCB connector specifically for controlling a fan using PWM and the fan that comes with this case does not have the correct connector. This fan is designed to plug into the 40 pin connector, power + ground. This means that you can't have a ribbon cable and the fan both attached at the same time, not without some major jury rigging. Probably the best bet would be to replace the connector on the fan so that you can take advantage of the PWM cooling regulation. However a simpler solution is to not connect the fan... When the cpu is lightly loaded (text editing, email) the fan makes very little difference. When the cpu is under heavy load the fan makes about a 10C difference..... but even under heavy load this computer runs cool enough that the fan is optional. I installed all of the provided heat sinks and was also happy to see that it came with extra screws and even a screwdriver. It was a bit of a trick to get the screwdriver out of the case.... potentially creating a humorous chicken and egg situation but if you are persistent it is possible to coax it out through the ribbon cable opening. I installed Debian Bookworm Desktop XFCE. It was very simple to do. The manual is rather pedantic but thorough and readable, it goes on for a long time about how to put the image onto a thumb drive.... using various techniques and 3rd party programs. But if you already have a Linux computer then all that you actually need to do is to use dd if={image} of={/dev/sdX-thumb-drive} status=progress I also installed the Orange Pi 5 Plus WiFi 6 Module. I was super happy to see that I was able to leave the antennas inside the case and have plenty of signal strength to connect to the WiFi station in another room, through a wall. I had been concerned that I would have to finagle something for the antennas but I just set them on top of the board and left them inside the case and the signal was able to pass though the vent holes without difficulty. My first test I tried it with the fan connected to the 3.3 volt and ground pins on the 40 pin connector. I had to hold my ear very close to the case to be able to hear it. It is not necessary to use the 5 volts which will be louder. I then wanted to stress test the OPi 5+ to see how hot it would get. So with my monitor in 1920x1080 mode I went to YouTube and played videos. I also installed "psensor" and ran "htop" too so that I could monitor the results. Playing one video was hardly even noticeable so I started opening up additional tabs and had a video playing in each tab. Once I had 8 videos playing at the same time I figured that was good enough for a stress test and left them running for about 10 minutes. The temperature never exceeded 48C. The UI was fully responsive and there was no noticeable jitter in any of the videos, the audio through the built-in audio jack (connected to an external speaker) sounded fine too. Everything ran buttery smooth. Wow! For my next test I disconnected the fan and attached a ribbon cable, which I ran through the opening closest to the connector. The cable effectively blocked that opening from acting as a cooling vent. I was concerned how the computer would perform with this substantial reduction in cooling. I went back to YouTube and again started playing multiple videos, when I got to 8 I let it run for awhile. The temperature was definitely higher then it had been with the fan running but it wasn't a huge difference. So I started adding more videos because I wanted to see where the limit was going to be. The Result was Mind Blowing.... It was difficult to come up with enough of a workload to challenge this computer. Finally I had 20 YouTube videos all playing at the same time with no observable jitters and no sluggishness of the UI, for good measure I also opened up "mousepad" and typed quickly. Even though cpu load was fluctuating around 80% to 90% the computer remained fully responsive. With 20 tabs running videos in 1080p mode I did notice some hesitation when switching tabs, but that was it. Under super heavy load and no fan running, I did finally manage to get the temperature to hit a peak of 80C, but only very briefly, for the majority of the time it was running in the 60C's to 70C's. I have the 8 Gig version and my memory use peaked at 6.6G That is a rather amazing result... I'm not sure that my desktop AMD Ryzen 9 could beat this performance. Based on these observations I conclude that the fan is optional and unnecessary for normal use. ============ One of the things that ~some~ reviewers were complaining about for the official Orange case is that it didn't have enough vertical room for a "hat". I don't actually have a "hat" to test this with but there is quite a bit of vertical space available in this case, especially if you remove the fan.

This case is built like a tank. Perfect fit and seems very well made. Takes about 5 minutes from unboxing to final screw. The fan is pretty quiet and have not had any issues with it since I got this about a month ago. Had a plastic one prior to this which wasn't the best protection. I have this mounted on the underside of the desk to keep things out of the way and it's been banged a few times with no issues.

Perfecto

This is a nice basic case to house the Orange Pi 5 PLUS. Heatsinks for components on the top of the board, SOC, RAM and PMU are included as is a fan BUT... if you want to use an NVMe drive, there is not enough room to use any size heatsink on the drive. Sad omission in the design of an otherwise nice little case.

Es excelente

I have been using this case for about a month. I'm very happy with it. Pro tip: If you don't like hearing the fan, you can make it run slower (which is pretty much silent) by attaching the positive (red) wire on the fan to pin #1 on the 40-pin connector instead of the way the instructions recommend. That feeds the fan 3.3 volts instead of 5 volts. Leave the black wire attached to the recommended ground pin in the instructions. I would definitely buy this again as it works great with my Orange Pi 5 Plus and keeps the temps between 33C and 40C.

El único pequeño inconveniente es que el conector del ventilador se tiene que conectar al GPIO de 5V porque el cable es con terminales DuPont en lugar del conector para PWM, por lo tanto el ventilador siempre está funcionando. Esto reduce la vida del ventilador drásticamente.

It's an ok case overall but the fan is much louder than necessary