SunFounder's Pironman 5-MAX Turns Your Raspberry Pi 5 Into a Dual-M.2 Gaming Desktop in Miniature

SunFounder, best known for its RasPad family of Raspberry Pi tablet conversion kits, has launched a new case for the Raspberry Pi 5 — turning it into a gaming desktop in miniature, complete with LED lighting, active cooling, and room for two Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) solid-state storage drives or artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators.

"The Pironman 5-MAX [is] our most advanced case yet," the company says of its latest launch. "Featuring dual NVMe M.2 slots with RAID 0/1 support, AI accelerator compatibility (e.g. Hailo-8L), a PCIe Gen. 2 switch, PWM [Pulse-Width Modulation] tower cooling + dual RGB fans, dual transparent panels with RGB lighting, and a smart OLED display with vibration wake-up."

Building on the company's earlier Pironman 5, the Pironman 5-MAX, brought to our attention by CNX Software, is designed to mimic a gaming PC in miniature — complete with transparent acrylic front and side panels. Like a gaming PC, it also includes a frankly unnecessary amount of cooling: two outtake fans sit at the rear of the case, while the Raspberry Pi 5 itself is cooled by a tower-style heatsink with third down-facing fan — and all include integrated RGB lighting.

The front of the case is home to a power button that triggers a safe shutdown on press, the Raspberry Pi's microSD card slot for easy access to storage, and a single-color 0.96" OLED display with tap-to-wake sensor for on-demand status information. There's also an infrared receiver for home-theater use, making use of the transparent front panel, while the Raspberry Pi 5's two micro-HDMI display outputs are broken out at the rear as full-size versions alongside USB and Ethernet connectivity.

Below the Raspberry Pi, and helping to justify the height of the case, is an add-on board which accepts one or two M.2 PCI Express (PCIe) modules — either NMVe storage devices or accelerator boards, or a mix of both. With only one PCIe lane available to the user on the Raspberry Pi 5, this is achieved using a PCIe switch — meaning bandwidth will be shared between the two devices. The Raspberry Pi's general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins, meanwhile, are brought out to a male header on the side panel.

SunFounder has opened pre-orders for the Pironman 5-MAX on its website at $71.24, an "early bird" discount for the first 500 buyers after which the case will go on sale at $94.99; the Raspberry Pi is not included for that price, but can be added alongside NVMe storage, camera modules, AI accelerators, and a power supply as optional extras.