DIY Water‑Cooled Raspberry Pi 5
Key Points
- The Raspberry Pi 5 is a compact yet powerful platform ideal for building a retro‑gaming machine, but its stock cooling limits its performance potential.
- To push the Pi’s limits, the creator designs a custom water‑cooling loop (pump, reservoir, radiator) and a generic copper water block to keep temperatures low.
- Because no ready‑made mounting solution exists, a 3‑D‑model of the Pi 5 board is used to print a bespoke four‑leg mount and backing plate to secure the water block directly over the CPU.
- The initial PLA mount deforms under heat, so it is reprinted in carbon‑fiber‑reinforced nylon, which tolerates temperatures up to ~200 °C and maintains reliable contact for optimal cooling.
Sections
- DIY Water‑Cooled Raspberry Pi 5 - The speaker outlines building a custom water‑cooling system for a Raspberry Pi 5 to maximize performance for a retro‑gaming PC.
- Removing CPU IHS for Better Cooling - The speaker demonstrates stripping the integrated heat spreader and its low‑quality thermal adhesive from a Raspberry Pi CPU using a hot‑air gun and careful prying to enable direct‑die contact for maximum cooling performance.
- USB‑C Power Delivery Retrofit - The speaker explains how they replaced a buck converter with a USB‑C PD trigger board to power a Raspberry Pi‑based system, tested fan and pump current, and began filling the coolant loop while cautioning against airlocks.
- Pushing Raspberry Pi 5 Beyond 3GHz - The speaker details incremental overclocking of a Raspberry Pi 5, encountering firmware frequency and voltage caps, briefly bypassing the 3 GHz limit with beta firmware, and ultimately reaching the practical ceiling of the CPU and GPU.
- S1 Pro: Revolutionary Floor‑Washing Robot - The S1 Pro is presented as the world’s first true floor‑washing robot vacuum, featuring a self‑cleaning rolling mop, a square chassis for superior edge coverage, and a base station that extracts dirty water, refills with ozonated tap water, and disinfects floors.
- Custom Raspberry Pi Case Build - The speaker explains how they enhanced a Raspberry Pi case by adding acrylic windows, embossing the logo, reworking the front, CNC‑cutting walnut, chamfering edges, and finishing with oil, while sharing tips on materials and processes.
- Custom PC Build with Batocera - The speaker details modeling individual parts, implementing a specialized cooling loop, and replacing Raspbian with the lightweight Batocera gaming OS on a Raspberry Pi for the final assembly.
- Overclocking Raspberry Pi for Gaming - Overclocking the Raspberry Pi 5 enhances its speed by over 30%, enabling smoother emulation of demanding consoles such as the GameCube, Wii, and potentially the PS2, turning borderline‑playable titles into a viable gaming experience.
- Member‑Only Postmortems & New Skills - The creator shares recent gains in 3D modeling, Linux emulation, and material science, and announces that detailed postmortem analyses will move to exclusive member videos, urging viewers to subscribe for early access and bonus content.
Full Transcript
# DIY Water‑Cooled Raspberry Pi 5 **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIcGbEoqBDo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIcGbEoqBDo) **Duration:** 00:25:31 ## Summary - The Raspberry Pi 5 is a compact yet powerful platform ideal for building a retro‑gaming machine, but its stock cooling limits its performance potential. - To push the Pi’s limits, the creator designs a custom water‑cooling loop (pump, reservoir, radiator) and a generic copper water block to keep temperatures low. - Because no ready‑made mounting solution exists, a 3‑D‑model of the Pi 5 board is used to print a bespoke four‑leg mount and backing plate to secure the water block directly over the CPU. - The initial PLA mount deforms under heat, so it is reprinted in carbon‑fiber‑reinforced nylon, which tolerates temperatures up to ~200 °C and maintains reliable contact for optimal cooling. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIcGbEoqBDo&t=0s) **DIY Water‑Cooled Raspberry Pi 5** - The speaker outlines building a custom water‑cooling system for a Raspberry Pi 5 to maximize performance for a retro‑gaming PC. - [00:03:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIcGbEoqBDo&t=188s) **Removing CPU IHS for Better Cooling** - The speaker demonstrates stripping the integrated heat spreader and its low‑quality thermal adhesive from a Raspberry Pi CPU using a hot‑air gun and careful prying to enable direct‑die contact for maximum cooling performance. - [00:06:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIcGbEoqBDo&t=379s) **USB‑C Power Delivery Retrofit** - The speaker explains how they replaced a buck converter with a USB‑C PD trigger board to power a Raspberry Pi‑based system, tested fan and pump current, and began filling the coolant loop while cautioning against airlocks. - [00:09:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIcGbEoqBDo&t=563s) **Pushing Raspberry Pi 5 Beyond 3GHz** - The speaker details incremental overclocking of a Raspberry Pi 5, encountering firmware frequency and voltage caps, briefly bypassing the 3 GHz limit with beta firmware, and ultimately reaching the practical ceiling of the CPU and GPU. - [00:12:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIcGbEoqBDo&t=758s) **S1 Pro: Revolutionary Floor‑Washing Robot** - The S1 Pro is presented as the world’s first true floor‑washing robot vacuum, featuring a self‑cleaning rolling mop, a square chassis for superior edge coverage, and a base station that extracts dirty water, refills with ozonated tap water, and disinfects floors. - [00:15:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIcGbEoqBDo&t=944s) **Custom Raspberry Pi Case Build** - The speaker explains how they enhanced a Raspberry Pi case by adding acrylic windows, embossing the logo, reworking the front, CNC‑cutting walnut, chamfering edges, and finishing with oil, while sharing tips on materials and processes. - [00:18:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIcGbEoqBDo&t=1131s) **Custom PC Build with Batocera** - The speaker details modeling individual parts, implementing a specialized cooling loop, and replacing Raspbian with the lightweight Batocera gaming OS on a Raspberry Pi for the final assembly. - [00:21:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIcGbEoqBDo&t=1315s) **Overclocking Raspberry Pi for Gaming** - Overclocking the Raspberry Pi 5 enhances its speed by over 30%, enabling smoother emulation of demanding consoles such as the GameCube, Wii, and potentially the PS2, turning borderline‑playable titles into a viable gaming experience. - [00:25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIcGbEoqBDo&t=1500s) **Member‑Only Postmortems & New Skills** - The creator shares recent gains in 3D modeling, Linux emulation, and material science, and announces that detailed postmortem analyses will move to exclusive member videos, urging viewers to subscribe for early access and bonus content. ## Full Transcript
This is a Raspberry Pi 5, and it is a seriously impressive
piece of hardware, especially when you consider its size.
With it,
you can very easily create a very powerful and very compact little computer.
In fact, I plan to use this particular Raspberry Pi five to create an awesome
retro gaming machine capable of running all of your favorite consoles.
But what if I told you that when you pick one of these up off the store shelf,
you don't really get its true potential?
you can dramatically increase the performance of one of these
if you're willing to put in a little bit of work or a lot of work.
We're going to see what it takes
to squeeze every last little bit of juice that we can out of this raspberry.
So what is the secret sauce?
Well, we're going to be water cooling it, because the lower we can keep
the temperatures, the harder
we can push the hardware and the faster we'll run our games.
The first problem I have to overcome is that nobody makes a pre-made water
cooling kit for the Raspberry Pi five, which means that I'm going
to have to make my own.
The first half is this pump, reservoir and radiator combo that I got on Amazon.
And it's actually meant to cool a 3D printer, the second half of the system
is going to be this generic copper water block which will sit on top
of all the Raspberry Pi's heat generating components, something like that.
This should keep everything nice and cool,
because water is much more effective at removing heat is than air alone.
But This copper water block has no way of attaching to the Raspberry Pi.
In order for optimal heat transfer, we need as much surface
contact as possible.
And yeah, this is just not going to cut it.
So I need to create a custom mount for it.
In order to do that, I created a 3D model of the Raspberry Pi five motherboard.
It's not super accurate, but it's got all the critical stuff that we need.
From there, I created a four legged mount that will hold the water block in place.
So with all that figured out, I started printing out my first prototype.
Thankfully, because it was so small, it didn't take very long to print.
And I also made this little temporary backing plate that holds the Pi in place
with brass standoffs.
By carefully tightening down each screw I now had the copper water block mounted
directly on top of the Raspberry Pi CPU, and it actually
looks pretty good for a first draft.
But I didn't think about one thing.
Oh, crap.
This is PLA plastic, and if you know anything about 3D
printing, you know that this is not the material to use.
As PLA heats up, it deforms and it loses almost all of its tensile strength.
So that means as we're gaming and generating heat, our water block here
is going to make worse and worse contact with the CPU, which is obviously not what what you want.
So in order to fix that, I reprinted the part
in a completely different material.
This is carbon fiber reinforced nylon.
And it can withstand temperatures of almost 200 degrees
before it starts to deform, which in a worst case
scenario, should give us over 100 degrees of headroom.
It's also significantly more expensive.
So it's actually probably a good thing
I did the early prototyping in a cheaper material.
There we go.
That eliminates any concerns I have about deformation.
So next, in our search for ultimate performance,
we need to take a look at the CPU.
Many people think that this is the CPU, but
it's actually just a thin layer of metal that covers CPU.
The actual CPU is, under here somewhere.
this metal is called the IHS or the integrated heat spreader.
And the problem with it is that it
adds a layer between our cooling and our hot CPU.
So I decided to remove it.
I grabbed my trusty soldering station that includes a hot air gun.
Set it to a nice low temperature
and began loosening the thermal adhesive that keeps the IHS in place.
As always, I'll include a link to it,
along with all the other tools and materials
that I'll use throughout this project down in the video description.
Once I got things nice and hot, I used a knife to very gently pry up the IHS.
The CPU die that sits below it is extremely fragile, so I took it
nice and slow.
One small slip of the blade and you can very easily break your Raspberry Pi.
Eventually, though, it popped right off.
Oh, there we go.
And now we can see why it's so bad for cooling.
That right there, that is very low quality thermal adhesive.
So with a little bit of rubbing alcohol
and some scrubbing, I was able to remove it.
Now a lot of people
will replace this adhesive with a higher performance thermal paste.
And then just reinstall the IHS.
But I think I'd rather get rid of it entirely.
If I can find a way to get this block to make direct contact with the die.
That will give us maximum cooling performance.
But looking at it I think we got some clearance issues.
are inlet pipe is hitting this little power switch here.
and also our Ram chip and our CPU are at different heights.
So it became clear to me that I was going to have to modify my copper water block.
These are one millimeter thick copper shims,
and by trimming them ever so slightly, I was able to fit
four of them side by side over top of the CPU and the Ram.
This will shift our CPU block up 2 millimeters higher
give us clearance over that button on the Pi's motherboard.
But obviously
we can't just stack them in place like that
because there's no way they'll effectively transfer heat.
So I set up to do a little bit of brazing.
I started by painting on some flux.
Not only does this stuff clear away any surface oxidation, which will allow us
to join our pieces together with solder, but it also has the effect of pulling
that solder into any small voids between the pieces, which will effectively
give us one solid block of copper in exactly the shape we need.
But looking at it, it didn't look great.
And you can see that it was visibly.
Well, not very flat.
but that's okay. I was prepared for that.
I set up a series of progressively finer wet sanding stations on my workbench.
I started at 400 grit and slowly sand down the worst of the imperfections.
I could have stopped there, but working my way down the bench,
I was able to get a smoother and smoother finish on the block.
And the smoother the block, the better it will transfer heat.
I didn't quite get it to a mirror finish,
but it's definitely better than the factory finish you'd get on most heatsinks.
So with all that done, I headed back to my office to test out my new block.
so I've got everything laid out in front of me
that I need to test the system,
but I'm realizing that I don't have any way to power it.
both the pump and the fan run on a 12 volt architecture.
And then if you look down here, there's this little buck converter board
that supplies that which is fed by this standard barrel plug adapter over here.
but, I don't have one of those, and it didn't come with one either.
So I'm actually just going to convert the whole system to run off of USB-C,
which is the same as the Raspberry Pi itself.
Now, that might sound a little complicated,
but it's actually easier than you might think by using a USB-C Power
Delivery trigger board
and setting these Dip switches, we can configure it to request
12V of power from a standard power delivery adapter,
like this one that I got from UGREEN
A quick check with the multimeter confirmed
everything was working correctly, and then I transplanted
the wiring harness from the buck converter to the new trigger board.
This whole process took less than ten minutes
and should make the whole setup a lot more convenient to use,
but I still wasn't sure that my adapter would provide enough current to spin both
the fan and the pump at the same time, so I set up to do a little bit of testing.
Not the quietest fan in the world.
If I'm being honest. Good airflow.
Definitely don't want to do this for too long.
Just a second.
Yep. There we go. Sweet.
With the power delivery sorted, I was able to start connecting hoses and
filling the system with distilled water, which is actually not the ideal coolant.
And we'll be replacing it later.
One thing you want to watch out for is that you don't accidentally airlock
your system.
It's pretty easy for air bubbles to block the small passageways
inside the radiator.
So as I'm adding water and running the pump, I'm also rotating
and agitating the whole system in an attempt to dislodge any bubbles.
Once I felt like
I got them all, I let the system run and kept an eye out for any leaks.
All right.
Our setup has been running for a little over an hour now.
There are no leaks.
It is still a little bit loud, which I attribute to there still
being some small air bubbles and loops, so hopefully that will quiet down later.
But for now I think we should get started on the software side of things
where I have some pretty cool stuff to show you guys.
The first thing I did was take first thing I did was take an SD card,
plug it into my computer and install Raspberry Pi OS on it.
This is a pretty basic
and stripped down version of Linux that's designed specifically for the Pi.
I then transferred it
I then transferred it to the Pi, ran through the initial setup,
and got dropped into this pretty barebones desktop environment.
From here, I installed Geekbench six and some temperature monitoring
software running Geekbench.
We can see that pretty quickly.
The Raspberry Pi heats up to the mid 80s, running at the stock 2.4GHz
and using the thermal camera, we can see that
yeah, the top of the die is a bit cooler, but pretty much in line with that number.
So now let's see how it does with our water block installed.
I used a little dot of Noctua thermal paste on the CPU die.
And then for the Ram chip to eliminate that slight difference in height
that I mentioned earlier, I used a small dab of K5 Pro.
This stuff is similar to thermal paste,
but designed to work at a much greater thickness.
With it, you can bridge gaps up to one millimeter.
So with that done, I reinstalled the block and booted up the Pi
to check out how much better my temps were.
And even I was shocked at the difference.
Whoa! That's a lot.
Oh ****
Needless to say, I was very pleased to see that my custom water
block had dropped the CPU temperature by almost 60 degrees,
which should give us a ton of headroom to push the CPU.
I started with small incremental overclocks.
The way you do
this is by editing a little config file on the Raspberry Pi and then rebooting it.
I went from 2.4GHz to 2.6GHz to 2.8GHz.
And I also slowly increased the voltage supplied to the CPU to help
keep it stable.
I pushed it to a nice round 3Ghz, and even that only managed
to raise the CPU's temperature by a degree or two at most.
but that is where I hit the wall.
Just not in the way that you might think.
I still had a ton of thermal headroom, but I couldn't go even ten megahertz higher.
Turns out the firmware on the Raspberry Pi 5 caps the CPU's frequency
at just 3Ghz which was very annoying.
So I went in search of a solution, and I think I found one
by forcing the Raspberry Pi to update to a beta version of the firmware.
I should be able to remove that cap.
Okay, let's see if this is 3.1GHz.
I'm going to be very happy
Uhhhhhhhh,
Yes, 3.1GHz.
Okay. We're through the barrier.
Now we can see how far above 3Ghz we can get.
Unfortunately, further testing revealed that 3.1GHz
was just about the limit of this particular CPU.
I was able to squeeze a tiny bit more out of it and a good bit more of the GPU too,
but anything more than that and the system would just lock up during benchmarking.
Given how lower temperatures are, we must be voltage limited.
And annoyingly, the firmware caps the max CPU voltage at just one volt.
Hey, everybody.
It's, future Zac here.
So I was basically done this project when fellow YouTuber Jeff
Geerling released a video showing how to remove that voltage limit.
with some very clever scripting, you can actually raise the voltage
limit to 1.1V, which is a considerable increase.
So, not wanting to leave any stone unturned,
I went back and followed his instructions to see if I could push my little
Pi here any further, and yeah, the results weren’t great.
Even with the increased voltage, I couldn't get any higher than 3.2GHz.
And I think what that comes down to
is just the good old fashioned silicone lottery.
some chips are just better than others.
Obviously I was hoping to get more than that.
But if you consider where we started from,
I still think 3.2GHz is a pretty sizable increase.
so now that we've found the limits of our setup,
the next thing that I want to do is honestly,
the next thing I want to do is get right into the game.
But before we do that,
I think we should create an enclosure to make this look a little bit
more cohesive and more like an actual game console as well.
And to be honest, this was a pretty tricky design exercise.
I had a lot of different parts that I had to account for,
and I wanted this thing to be as small as possible.
So the first thing I did was measure and model all of my main components.
This might seem a little unnecessary at first,
but it allowed me to try out a number
of different orientations and find the best possible configuration.
I eventually settled on this one because it gave me a relatively tight
footprint and with the right case design should give me good access
to all the components in case I need to fix or replace anything later on.
Now, before we get into the designing and printing of the case, first
I want to tell you guys about something
that I found hugely helpful on this project
the Eufy S1 Pro,
because you've is also the sponsor of today's video.
The S1 Pro is the world's first and best floor washing robot vacuum.
The 3D printing process lift a bunch of small plastic debris on my office floor.
But thankfully I had the S1 Pro configured to clean my office
every night once I was done filming.
In fact, it cleans my entire house.
And you might be thinking that I've seen mopping robot vacuums before.
So how is the S1 Pro the first or the best?
Well, most mopping robot vacuums use either a vibrating or a rotating mop pad.
But eufy's designers realized
that those systems often just kind of spread the mess around.
So instead, the S1 produces a rolling mop head that cleans itself
with every revolution, ensuring top notch cleanliness and efficiency.
It also has a square body design that allows for the industry's widest
mopping ruler, and the best possible edge cleaning capabilities,
And creating a square robot vacuum was no small feat.
They had to completely rewrite
all the pathfinding algorithms to accommodate that new shape.
But what it all adds up to
is a robot vacuum that actually washes your floors instead of just mopping them.
You can see I set up this test area with various stuff to remove messes,
and the S1 Pro completely clean the floor with nothing left behind.
It's also got this really cool looking
base station that pulls dust and dirty water out of the robot
after every cleaning cycle, And then refills the robot with ozonated tap
water that it creates in this tank that naturally disinfects your floors.
and then probably my favorite feature of the S1
Pro is its 3D Matrix Eye obstacle avoidance system.
The S1 Pro will map and navigate around your home using LiDAR,
but it also has another AI powered system that uses a combination of infrared
and conventional
imaging to avoid accidentally sucking up anything that it shouldn't.
So if you want more information about the S1 Pro, or you just want to get your own,
check out the link down in the video description.
And now let's get back to designing and building this case.
The first thing I did was design a super simple prototype enclosure.
Basically, the only thing I'm trying to do here
is make sure that all my models line up with reality.
So I'm testing to make sure my screw holes and my USB ports line up.
Sure enough, there were a couple of small things
that I had to change, and I figured, well, I was making another prototype.
I may as well solve the issue of the Raspberry Pi’s ports.
Looking at the motherboard, you can see that there are ports along two sides.
But I want all of my wires to come out the back of the case.
So I added these short extensions that allowed me to reroute them.
I modified my case design to create some openings
for them along with the trigger board.
and then did a quick test fit.
So there we go with a couple of quick design iterations.
We have all of the hard work done,
and now we can get on to, well, kind of the fun part of the case design.
Like I said earlier,
servicability was important to me, so I opted for a split shell design.
My first attempts were split the case like this, but I quickly realized
that that was just way too complicated and didn't work very well.
So instead, I opted for two interlocking U shaped pieces, which works a lot better.
The next problem I had to tackle was airflow.
Sure, I had the front intake, but I didn't have anywhere for that air to go.
So I added all these little exhaust cutouts on the back side.
I also wanted all the internals to be visible,
so I added cutouts for some acrylic windows
and then just to give it a little bit of visual flair.
I embossed the Raspberry Pi logo on the top side of the case.
Finally, I reworked the entire front face to make it both better looking
and more functional.
But rather than showing you a low resolution render,
I'd rather just show you how I made it.
So all my 3D printers worked on printing the revised case.
I hit up the shop to get started on that.
the first thing I did was find some fresh walnut
and prep it for the C and C, because it's such a small piece.
I added some double sided tape to prevent my CNC from turning it into a projectile.
initial shape here is pretty simple.
It's just a big round opening that's the same size as the fan.
To add some dimension to it, I headed over to my router table
and used a chamfer bit to add a slight bevel to all the exterior edges.
in theory, this might also make the fan a little quieter too,
but I've got something much better planned for that later.
A quick oil rub finish sealed the wood and to my eyes anyways.
Gave it a much nicer finish as well.
And while the CNC was still warmed
up, I also cut the two acrylic side windows that I mentioned earlier.
As always, make sure that you get cast acrylic instead of extruded acrylic
for use on the CNC.
It cuts so much nicer and won't cracker chip on you.
the next thing I did should hopefully save me quite a bit of time in the future.
If you've ever opened up an old game console,
you know that these things are basically just big dust traps.
So in order to prevent that, I got this fine metal mesh that I planned
to use to filter the front intake.
It's thin enough that I could just market what I needed
and then flex it along those lines until it snapped.
at first I temporarily tacked it in place with some CA glue.
And then once our case is done printing, we'll be able to fasten it more securely.
But first, I've got to solve another problem.
The fan on this system is just way too loud.
For reference, it's
generating about 46dB of sound and has a pretty annoying pitch to it.
So to solve that, I went out and bought this ultra quiet fan from Noctua,
which was actually so quiet that it failed to register on my noise meter.
It probably doesn't move quite as much air,
but given our completely overkill cooling setup,
I really don't think that's going to matter.
Unfortunately, both fans,
despite having the same operating voltage, have different connectors.
So I had to do the old switcheroo, which in this case was just a matter
of splicing the old connector onto the new fan, soldering them together,
and then sealing everything with some heat shrink tubing.
and then finally, after all of that, the case had finished printing Again,
I didn't want to use the standard PLA, so I opted for carbon fiber reinforced PETg.
This stuff should be much more heat resistant, and because it has crushed up
carbon fiber in it, it's got this super cool matte finish.
But I'm sure you're asking yourself, what is that green colored plastic
that's also in there?
Well, that is support interface, and it's basically just a thin layer of a second
plastic that sits between the support structure and the actual print.
This stuff makes it weighs
or to remove your supports
and gives you a much nicer surface texture where they interface.
After I had all that pulled off,
I installed my acrylic windows
with the help of some CAA glue and then screwed the front intake panels
in place, which permanently sandwiched all three layers together.
I then started installing all of my components inside the case,
which was truthfully a bit of a make or break moment for me.
there were dozens of variables
here, and I still wasn't 100% sure it was all going to line up correctly.
To my surprise, though, everything actually fit together really well.
And honestly, I think that's because I took the time to model
each of my individual parts before I designed the case.
it was definitely a bit more up from work,
but in the end, I think it saved me a lot of time.
the last step was filling the loop.
And here I'm hoping to gain back at least a little bit of the performance
that was lost with our quieter fan.
This is a specially designed coolant, and I actually had it leftover
from my water cooled desk project.
Not only does it have
a bunch of additives in it that prevent corrosion and fungal growth,
But it also has an additive in it that makes it more effective
at transferring heat.
So after burping the system a few times, I left everything running
to work out a little micro air bubbles and I got ready to do the fun stuff.
so before we install the other
half of the case, I'm going to pop the SD card out of the Raspberry Pi.
We're going to format it to remove Raspbian OS
and instead we're going to install an operating system specifically designed
for gaming, Batocera
*struggling to pronounce Batocera*
I don't know how you say it,
but apparently it's supposed to be really good.
And here's the cool thing about Batocera
Instead of using a traditional desktop environment like the Raspberry Pi OS,
it's got a stripped down,
lightweight launcher that's specifically focused on gaming,
which makes it a lot easier to use as a game console.
Once you boot it up, you are greeted with this screen
where you can see all the different systems that our Pi can emulate.
It also makes it really easy to transfer over games
because Batocera just appears like a computer on my network.
So all I have to do is drag and drop ROMs into the respective
folder on my desktop, which I suppose is a good point
to mention that obviously it's illegal to use ROMs that you don't actually own.
I'm definitely not endorsing piracy here.
So everything from the original Atari to the Super Nintendo Genesis kind of era
runs flawlessly here, and I don't think that's a surprise to anyone.
These games all look and feel great, and it's honestly
probably where I'll spend most of my time, then getting into systems
where the previous Raspberry Pi four struggled, like the N64,
the Sega Dreamcast, and the PlayStation one.
Well, here things are looking really good.
The Raspberry Pi five emulates these systems without breaking a sweat,
And honestly,
you don't need to go to all the effort of water cooling and overclocking
your Pi to get these systems to play, just like they did back in the day.
But that doesn't mean that our extra work here was wasted,
because one of the best parts about emulating these old systems
is that you can actually make them look a lot better.
We can do all sorts of fun stuff, like cranking up the rendering resolution.
here.
I was able to render the original Sonic adventure at 2.5 times
its original resolution, which makes it look just so much better.
You can also add smoothing, anti-aliasing, texture filtering,
and all sorts of different stuff.
And the only limitation here is how much computational horsepower you have, in fact,
some games are easier to run than others, even within the same system.
So you often have to dial in your specific enhancements on a per game
basis, which, if you're a geek like me, is actually kind of enjoyable.
But the point is, our crazy overclock allows us to push these enhancements
even further while still getting a smooth gaming experience.
So an overclocked Pi will actually look better than a non
overclocked one, Which I guess kind of brings me nicely to the next reason
as to why an overclock is so important.
The systems that came out after the ones that we've already
mentioned, the first two, which I'll talk about are the Gamecube and the wii.
Yeah. That's right.
It's possible to emulate both of these systems on the Raspberry Pi five.
Kinda.
it really comes down to which games you want to run.
Some games are great and run buttery smooth,
but others require more graphics processing that this thing can handle.
Like in The Legend of Zelda Wind Waker here.
The grass here kind of kills my FPS.
That being said,
because this Raspberry Pi five is over 30% faster than a stock one.
It's the one you want to be using when you're playing games
that are right on the edge of what's possible.
That overclock might be the difference between your favorite game
actually being playable or not.
And then, speaking of being right on the edge of what's possible.
The PlayStation two.
Oh, man. Okay. This was an ordeal.
So earlier versions of Batocera had support for the two baked in,
but at a certain point the devs removed it because they felt like the Raspberry
Pi couldn't handle it.
So as configured, this system right now cannot play PS2 games.
However, I thought that
maybe just maybe, my turbocharged system might be able to do it.
So I went in search of a solution, and I found out there's
this emulator called AetherSX2 that will work on Linux.
So I went back into Raspberry Pi OS, tried to run it and it just wouldn't work.
So I did some more research and everyone said that it works
best in ubuntu, which is a very popular desktop version of Linux.
The problem is the latest release of Ubuntu was glitched
and wouldn't load on my Raspberry Pi.
Even more research later, and I found out that there's a way
to fix that bug by editing a config file after a lot of swearing.
I eventually got Ubuntu running,
Did a bunch of terminal commands, which I barely understand.
And finally, finally I got my PS2 emulation running on the Raspberry Pi.
And what did I find?
Well, I found a new appreciation for Windows and Mac
OS because Linux is really annoying to use sometimes.
But on the gaming front.
Well, the results are kind of similar to the Gamecube and the way some games
work and others are struggle Generally speaking, games that run at 30 FPS
are usually better and games that run at 60 FPS are usually worse.
Overall, it's just not quite there and I can understand
why the Batocera devs removed support for the PS2,
but I also feel like
with a bit of optimization and a little bit more development, PS2
emulation might just be within reach of the Raspberry Pi five.
But yeah, right now I would not recommend it.
So was it all really worth it then?
if all you care about is gaming then.
No probably not.
You could grab a Raspberry Pi, get a cheap off the shelf cooler and probably get
like 90% of the performance I did for a very small fraction of the effort.
But as far as projects go, it was 100% worth it.
Not only did I level up my 3D modeling skills, but I also learned absolute ton
about Linux emulation, material science, and a whole host of other small lessons.
now. Normally I do a postmortem analysis right now,
but I've actually decided to do those as separate members only videos.
And I've explained my reasoning in a community post linked down below.
So become a member if you want to see that.
Get early access to videos, see sneak peeks of upcoming projects,
and hopefully some
other fun bonus content, And on that note, I will see you guys in the next one.
Peace.