Number 5 is alive
Raspberry Pi have just announced their latest Single Board Computer, the Raspberry Pi 5. It costs $80 ($60 for the 4 gigabytes of RAM version) and will be available from late October 2023.
It’s billed as the ‘everything computer’, so we tried doing the one thing we’ve never managed with any of its predecessors: A non-laggy desktop machine on a 4k Display.
Can this 80 dollar machine replace your desktop computer?
In an attempt to find out, we’ll put a typical desktop setup with our favourite terminal and a few apps we commonly use, and record the results.
If it works, then we’ll confidently declare to all our friends that it is the year of the Linux Desktop…again.
So why do we think this might be the first Pi to deliver a smooth enough desktop experience to live up to the label of the ‘everything computer’?
Well, the spec sheet says that the 4 core CPU is 2-3 times faster than in Pi 4 and there’s also significant upgrades in graphics. Thanks to it being the first Raspberry Pi to have their RP1 chip which makes all things IO like cameras, and displays much faster. It also has a PCIE 2.0 interface for the first time, which means you can use high bandwidth peripherals like PCIE SSD drives. Oh yeah, there’s no longer a composite-out jack plug, which may mean that it isn’t the best choice for retro gaming projects that involve connecting it to a CRT screen. One small but significant addition is a power button, so now you can gracefully shut the Pi down when it’s running headless and you want to quickly turn it off.
It initially comes with 4 or 8 gigabytes of RAM, we’re using the 8 gigabyte version.
Results
We added a barebones case, a 1 Terabyte USB SSD for storage, a Raspberry Pi 5 Active Cooler, a trackball and a keyboard, and connected it to a 4K monitor. Surprisingly, it could record 4k video in OBS despite the lack of support for the new and exotic video hardware.
Conclusion
The Raspberry Pi 4 was the first Pi that was fast enough to run a bare bones desktop without being troubled too often by annoying lags, but the lags were definitely still there. The Raspberry Pi 4 is still a good choice for most applications and maybe even a better choice for things like retro-gaming with a CRT monitor (or weird crypto powered Jukeboxes), thanks to its composite out video/audio jack.
For a desktop computer, the Raspberry Pi 5 appears to be a big improvement over the 4. Where the Raspberry Pi 5 really shines is IO performance. The experience is smooth and we did a couple of days of relatively processor-intensive stuff:
Number-crunching in R Studio,
Image editing of high resolution photos with GIMP/Graphic design with Inkscape (both applications were surprisingly fast to load and responsive)
Encryption of large files with GPG
In short, the Raspberry Pi 5 is a viable desktop computer*
Caveats
One thing to add is that active cooling is a must. We ran the Raspberry Pi 5 without a fan and after just a few minutes, the processor temperature was above the 70C and throttling (the computer equivalent of being forced to walk slowly on a hot day) started to kick in. Adding the official Raspberry Pi active cooler meant that it never strayed far from 50C, so if you’re getting a Raspberry Pi 5, definitely cost-in a cooling solution.
Oh yeah, and our favourite addition is the power button. If you’d told the 1990s version of us, with our massive beige home-made PC, that the future-us would be using a computer the size of a deck of cards, that cost 80 dollars, and that it took the makers until the 5th version to put a power button on said machine… Well...
Speaking of the past. The title was a reference to this cinematic gem:
*It’s also worth noting that this is currently based on a few of days using it. We generally say nice things about Raspberry Pi, so factor that into all of this.
