[Aurornis]

Having the burst performance is helpful.

Most light workloads are very bursty. When you type a command or click on something you want latency to be low. Having the overhead to get it done quickly at the full clockspeed is good if you are latency sensitive.

Throttling has become a bad word. Some feel compelled to avoid it at all costs, doing things like buying big coolers and running synthetic benchmarks to avoid it. Unless you're doing sustained workloads where you need all of the performance, allowing a little throttling is fine.

[flyinghamster]

I've been doing some heavy SDR lifting with a couple of my Pi 5s, and my own experience is that the active cooler works extremely well, and more often than not the fan can be shut off and it will work well as a passive cooler.

[margalabargala]

If you're consistently doing bursty loads that throttle, the thermal cycles are going to do some damage to your chip and it'll fail sooner than if you ran it cooler.

[brucehoult]

Yeah, in 20 years instead of 100 years.

I'm going to replace it before then.

[ssl-3]

So that means what, exactly?

Do heat cycles mean that the device only lasts half as long as it might if it were kept at some constant ideal temperature? A third as long?

If so, then...so what? The tinkerers using these things aren't broadly concerned about these things. We're all out here running our real-live desktop, laptop, and pocket computers with bursty loads, dynamic clocks, and dynamic heat anyway, and these things are generally doing just fine. We aren't driving space ships with this stuff; it'll be alright.

I insist that there is no merit to holding a lowly Raspberry Pi board to a higher standard than we hold everything else.

Furthermore: If perfection is necessary for some kind of application, then maybe starting with a <$100 hobby SBC isn't the best move. It might be time to look within for a better pathway.