The Raspberry Pi 5 Can Breathe Easy, Thanks to a Cooler-Friendly New M.2 HAT+ Compact Board

Raspberry Pi has launched a more compact take on its M.2 HAT+ for the Raspberry Pi 5, taking cues from third-party alternatives with an L-shaped board design that leaves more room for cooling fans to do their work.

The Raspberry Pi 5 launched in late 2023 as the first model in the consumer-oriented single-board computer family to feature a user-accessible PCI Express lane — exposed on a flat flexible circuit (FFC) connector which required a breakout board and a handful of components to interface with PCIe hardware like Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) storage devices and high-performance machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) accelerators.

That board, though, wouldn't launch until May the following year, having been beaten to market by a range of third-party alternatives. Known as the Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+, the add-on connects to the Raspberry Pi 5's general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header and the PCIe FFC connector and provides an M-key M.2 slot capable of accepting 2230 and 2242 footprint modules. Almost the full footprint of the Raspberry Pi 5, minus its connectors, the board works fine — but doesn't play nicely with the integrated cooling fan in the official Raspberry Pi 5 case.

That's where the new Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ Compact comes in: it's the same hardware, but in a much more compact design — an L-shaped layout, already adopted by a number of third-party accessory makers, which keeps the area above the Raspberry Pi 5's Broadcom BCM2712 system-on-chip free and clear. Performance, the company says, should be identical between the two models, though the Compact variant only supports the smallest of 2230-footprint M.2 modules.

The Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ Compact is now available from the company's reseller network, priced at $15 — a $3 premium over the original M.2 HAT+, now known as the M.2 HAT+ Standard.