Argon40 Argon NEO5 + Poly+5 RPi5 Cases

This might be of interest to those of you who own one or more Raspberry Pi 5 boards (NOT previous models such as RPi3 or 4):

Argon40 have been around for some years now, producing a range of cases for various Raspberry Pi models. I’ve used several over the years and this week they sent me a couple of their latest cases for RPi5 – the “Argon Poly+5 with PWM fan” and the “Argon POLY+5 with THRML 3-AC”. Shortly thereafter they sent the NEO5 case + M2 NVME board.

I’m personally interested in the NEO5 with NVME as I plan to use my RPi5 with NVME in the case – and SD for backup using RPi-clone (I wrote about the latter here – the original rpi-clone no longer works with the latest Pi-OS and RPi5 but there is a way around it thankfully – see link above).

Meanwhile just a quick mention about the two Poly+5 variations:

Poly+5 with PWM fan first… here is some imagery…

First impressions – well packed – nice, quality case – adequate aluminium heat sinks and the fan looks pretty standard – and that’s all I can say about the latter – bear in mind that none of them last forever. I have 2 variations on this case – one has a red clear top allowing you to see the fan, the other has a dark grey clear top.

There is a snap-on cover to protect your SD. The manual is quite thorough for 4-sided job.. but makes no mention of PWM so I wondered if you have any control over fan speed.. so I went off to the Argon 40 website.

I found the manual which is just a PDF of the 4-sided job that came with the fan.

In the past, Argon40 would make available scripts to control fans – but I’m not seeing anything on the site or after a quick look at their forums.

Meanwhile TIM (see comments) has the answer). Also – Argon40 just came back to me – and I quote:

The FANs connected to the POLY+5 and NEO 5 are now controlled directly with the Raspberry Pi 5 by default. If the user wants settings outside of the raspberry Pi default settings they need to set the settings in the firmware via config.txt

The Argon ONE V3 still have our MCU controlling the power button and the fan speeds, which we also dropped in the Argon ONE V5.

And so, onto the POLY+5 with THRML 30-AC.

So this case has a much better looking fan/heatsink arrangement but again I can’t at first glance find anything about controlling the fan speed via a script – again see TIM’s comment in the comments section. The package is well boxed and comes complete with adhesive foot pads, thermal strip and 4-sided instructions. The top lifts off and the cover above the USB and network connectors can also be lifted off if need be. I have one unit with the dark grey clear cover and one with the clear RED cover – I prefer the former, others may disagree – in both cases you can see through them to see the fan operating (or not). One is referred to as “BLACK” – the other as “BRED”.

In both cases the fan/heatsink arrangement is unpainted aluminium.

As usual I’m not going to get into pricing other than to say these are inexpensive and of course, price inc tax, duty (where applicable) and postage will vary depending on where you live.

I’ve made no comment about the on-off button cover on these boxes as I have yet to turn on or off an RPI using a button.

NEO5 NVME case +SSD

And now the long-awaited NEO5 case + M2 NVME SSD.

In the bottom of the case fits the M2 NVME. For reasons behond me, once the case is fitted up – you can’t access the SD from the outside – but as the RPI5 can be set to boot from NVME/SSD etc first I guess there’s no harm in leaving the SD inside for cloning. Should the NVME fail of course then with a dead RPI, you’d have to open the case to disconnect the NVME to allow the RPi5 to boot from SD.

Anyway, here is how the case and M2 NVME drive arrived…

Initially I felt daunted but in fact the whole assembly – RPI into case, SSD lead attached, fan attached – all took maybe 10 minutes.

No screwdriver supplied but 3 thermal pads and the RPi5 to SSD connector (and a spare) were all included along with 6 bolts (one of which (corner) I cannot get to stay put). Finally 4 tiny rubber feet included. All looks quite neat on my bench right now.

A script is provided to set up the NVME – not used it yet, I simply used the RASPI-CONFIG program to set my RPI back to booting from SD, put the lot together, turned on and…

As you can see, rather than SDA etc for SSDs, there is an nvme0n1 in there so on booting from SD, I set rpi-clone off making a clone.. then told raspi-config to boot off NVME now first.

In the terminal after booting, I typed in the following code which then returned “nvme0n1” – which told me that the RPi5 had booted correctly from the NVME. I’ve since checked that in fact in this mode, RPI will boot from nvme, THEN SSD THEN SD. So really I can use an SSD (on USB) for backup if I want – saves messing with SDs at all… and of course as always, the (modified for RPi5) rpi-clone makes it so easy.

lsblk -o pkname,mountpoint | egrep '/$' | cut -d' ' -f1

So – up to now – happy. Nice looking case, operating perfectly apart from that last underside mounting bolt… I guess I’ll try the Argon40 recommended script next.

Oh, I got the whole construction sorted from the tiny manual they provided without having to go looking elsewhere. All it needs now is a go-faster stripe.