Comment by devmor
17 hours ago
> The Pi 4 / 5 will run OKish without a heatsink at idle wattages, but thermal throttle quickly if you attempt to do something intensive.
Even with a heatsink and fan, I had to upgrade to a higher quality set to keep Jellyfin from thermal throttling a Pi5 while transcoding 4K video.
4k video transcoding is anything but an idle load.
Especially on the Pi 5, which has no hardware encoder to save on power consumption for that task. It's entirely in the CPU.
(Technically the Pi 4's hw encoder doesn't go up to 4K either, though, so I guess moot point).
Yes, that is “something intensive”, as was said in the few words of the sentence I quoted that came after the words “idle load”.