SunFounder sent a review sample of the Pironman 5 Max Tower PC case for the Raspberry Pi 5. It has various improvements over the original Pironman 5, including a sleek black aluminum and semi-transparent acrylic design, a dual NVMe PiP expansion board, Tap-to-Wake for the OLED, and programmable RGB LEDs.

• Unboxing and assembly: The kit comes with many parts and an assembly guide. It includes a Raspberry Pi AI Kit for testing with an M.2 Hailo-8L accelerator. The assembly process involves installing various components like the metal case, fans, OLED, and more. There were some mistakes made during assembly initially, like incorrect fan orientation.
• OS support and configuration: The Pironman 5 Max is supported by several operating systems, but the GPIO fan may not work on Kali Linux. Raspberry Pi OS needs to be configured with specific commands to enable features like RGB LEDs and the OLED.
• Web interface and CLI: The Pironman5 can be configured through a web interface on port 34001 or the pironman5 CLI. It allows control of various parameters like RGB LEDs, fan modes, and OLED settings. Disabling the dashboard can improve performance as it uses CPU.
• Feature testing: Key features like the OLED, RGB LEDs on the IO expandander board and fan, IR receiver, power button, RTC clock, and M.2 sockets with NVMe SSDs and Hailo-8L AI accelerator were tested. Performance and thermal cooling were also evaluated, showing good results with the large heatsink and fans.
• Power consumption: Power consumption was measured under different conditions, with the highest being around 7.6 Watts with all features on.
• Conclusion: The Pironman 5 Max is a great PC Tower case for the Raspberry Pi 5 with many improvements. It is over-engineered but has a charming design. It keeps the features of the Raspberry Pi 5 and is available for purchase at different prices. The author thanks SunFounder for the review sample.