Introduction:
This is the new Raspberry Pi 5, and it's kind of amazing. It's got a new CPU, GPU, and custom Raspberry Pi silicon, the RP1. Who are these guys, Apple? Everything is like twice as fast on the Pi 5: USB transfer speeds, micro SD card transfer speeds.
It has a PCIe 2.0 interface, the RAM is faster, HDMI is better, and it has better camera connections. This thing is so powerful, they had to make an active cooler for it. Have they ever done that before? I don't know. It's got everything we have: a power button. Frankly, that's all I needed to know, I'll take 20. But seriously, the Raspberry Pi 5 is kind of amazing.
Can it truly be a desktop replacement? Can we game on this? Can we hack on this thing? We will do a deep dive on the specs, do a few benchmarks, and see how it performs against the Raspberry Pi 4. I'm really excited to play with this. Are you ready? Let's do this. Now, the release of the Raspberry Pi 5 right now is a pretty big deal. We haven't had one for four years.
2019 is when the Raspberry Pi 4 came out, and also, Evan Upton said we wouldn't have a Raspberry Pi in 2023, but we are going to. In fact, let me drop that for you real quick so you'll be able to buy a Raspberry Pi 5 fresh off the line, I think in October sometime in October. You'll have two options to choose from, starting with the 4 GB model at 60 USD and the 8 GB model at 80 USD.
That's right, no more 2 GB model, just two options now. Let's take a deep dive into the specs, what's making this thing tick, and why it's so great. First, the CPU: we've got a whopping 2.4 GHz quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex A76 CPU. This thing is intense. They say it's got two to three times the performance over the Raspberry Pi 4.
We're going to test that here in a bit. It also has cryptographic extensions to help with, you know, cryptographic things like security VPN encryption. Now, the GPU is also pretty crazy. We have an 800 MHz Video Core V2 GPU supporting OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulcan 1.2, and we'll need that GPU for the dual 4K 60p HDMI output with HDR support.
I told you, it's like a full-on desktop PC now. I think the biggest thing is the RP1. This is silicon designed in-house by Raspberry Pi. The RP1 is their South Bridge, the chip that controls the I/O between the CPU and external peripherals, so thank USB ports, Ethernet ports, storage interfaces. Now, what this unlocks is faster everything.
USB speeds are now similar to the Raspberry Pi 4. We've got two USB 2.0 interfaces and two USB 3.0 interfaces, but the USB 3.0 can do 5 gigabits per second, simultaneous 5 gigabits per second operation. Now, that's crazy. That's a big deal for, I don't know, making a Raspberry Pi NAS, which we did. The 5 will blow that.
Basic:
Big change in camera interfaces on previous models: we had a dedicated one-gigabit per second two-lane MINI camera and display interface. That's been replaced by a pair of four-lane 1.5 gigabits per second MINI transceivers. This triples the total bandwidth, supporting a combination of up to two cameras or displays.
And I know some of you are looking for onboard storage, like that was something I was kind of hoping for, but they gave us higher SD card speeds. They say that peak SD card performance is doubled, and they’re supporting now the SDR 104 high-speed mode.
And then this one is just kind of crazy, but they now have a PCIe 2.0 interface. This opens up a whole new world for high-bandwidth peripherals. I mean, just, oh my gosh, the projects this opens up for us, are you kidding me? So think like, maybe network cards, connecting SSDs, just faster, better everything. Now, the RAM also got a facelift.
We're now rocking LPDDR4x-4267. And then, of course, we can't forget the thing that was on everyone’s wish list: the power button. It’s here, it’s finally here, and it’s a button. You press it, and it does stuff. We're going to find out what exactly it does here in a bit. Now, Wi-Fi is still the same: dual-band 802.11ac. We still have Bluetooth 5, but we also have BLE, or Bluetooth Low Energy support. It also has an RTC, or real-time clock, powered by an external battery, so when your Raspberry Pi turns off, it’s still keeping time.
Okay, the first thing I'm going to do is set up a Raspberry Pi desktop. Now, here I’ve got a 4K monitor and another 4K monitor. Now, the reason I’m doing this is that the Raspberry Pi 5 can now support dual 4K 60 frames per second outputs. 4K dual 60 frames per second—let’s test it out. As I mentioned earlier, the Raspberry Pi comes with an active cooler.
I believe this is the first time they’ve ever made one, because this sucker draws so much power and produces a ton of heat because it’s doing more things; it’s faster. Okay, this thing is just cool. So, it looks like it has adhesives already on there for the components that need to be chilled off, like the RP1, the GPU, and the CPU. And I hope I’m doing this right.
Oh, it’s got a little thing, a little screw. I guess if I line those screws up, I’m also kind of golden. It’s in place. I think punch it through, punched in one, punched in two. Okay, cool, so it kind of had a punch-in spring lock action, which was kind of nice. Now it’s in there. I don’t think it’s ever coming out, so you’re in there for good, buddy.
Features:
Okay, we got a red light. Oh, there goes the active cooler, and will we get display? Oh my gosh, I can feel the air coming out of it. That sucker’s powerful! Oh, and there it goes. It’s actually not that quiet. I almost forgot to get my keyboard out. There we go, fresh Raspberry Pi keyboard, and of course, we also need the mouse. The mouse does indeed work.
I’ve got all my Raspberry Pi peripherals plugged in. All right, it’s super tiny, but now it’s telling us we have some things to do to get started. Let’s go! So far, this seems like a pretty typical Raspbian setup—sorry, Raspberry Pi OS, I can never get used to saying that. I was actually curious—it did come with an SD card already installed, and I was hoping they’d have Raspberry Pi OS for me already, and they did, thank you. Now, searching for a Wi-Fi network, it’s having trouble. Okay, definitely should have found one by now. I’m just going to click on next.
We’ll skip the software update. There’s no Wi-Fi, and now let’s restart. Listen to that thing! Oh, look at that. Okay, this actually looks kind of amazing. They got a nice background here. No Wi-Fi just yet. Let me see if I can get a connection. Now, it seems to legit be having trouble connecting to Wi-Fi. Oh, I was missing an O. We’re connected! I was getting worried about that. Now, I’ll go ahead and just do my system update. Got a bunch of stuff to do.
Let’s go ahead and install everything and take a little coffee break. Now, what I want to do is see if the Raspberry Pi 5 could kind of be a desktop replacement. How does it feel to use it? And we’ll do all kinds of crazy stuff. Now, first, one thing I noticed, and I tested this out, is that when I press the Pi 5’s power button while a system’s up, pressing it will prompt you to go, "Do you want to shut down or restart?" You press it again, it just shuts down.
Let’s try booting it up by pressing the button. Yep, there it goes. I’m a huge fan of the power button. I hate having to unplug it and plug it back in. I feel like I’m breaking it every time. This is fantastic. So, what do you say we do a few things, like I don’t know, let’s watch some videos. Okay, so I’ll launch a web browser here. Now, notice it’s not like the snappiest thing in the world.
We’re on an SBC, a single-board computer, but it is on two 4K 60 frames per second monitors, so I mean, as I’m moving back and forth, it’s not too bad. It’s a little laggy. Let’s get a video going. Looks like our fan has already engaged, cooling our system. Okay, so we got one video here, and it looks pretty good.
If I expand this, you’ll be able to tell that pretty well, but this is kind of testing the networking. Notice, it is taking a bit to expand it, kind of testing the networking video. As you can see here, GPU usage is at 98%, CPU is pretty good. Yeah, GPU is kind of stressing out a little bit. Check our temp—51 degrees. We’re climbing, and that’s Celsius.
Let me minimize this a bit. I want to see what it does when I play a few videos now. Again, so far, you’re not going to have like an amazing desktop experience. Like, I noticed it is starting to stutter a bit here as I’m just trying to open up another browser, but it’s starting to normalize. Okay, well, that video’s starting to stutter, but so far it’s starting to kind of be okay a little bit.
Checking in with our temps, yeah, and usage is climbing for sure. Check our command line temperature. Let’s take a study of 51, so that active cooling is working. Let’s open up a third video. We are really putting this GPU through its paces, and we’re not even doing 4K yet.
We’re just doing 720p. So yeah, my videos are starting to stutter a little bit. Temperatures climbing, so lots of things happening. I’m playing four YouTube videos, which I assume you probably don’t do to most people anyway, and let’s just see if I can do other stuff while it’s doing that, so like multitasking things.
Conclusion:
Insane, what was that crypto score again? Crypto score 654,158 on the Pi 5, not even close. Machine learning again: 284 versus 189 on the Pi 4. Pi 5 is killer! Now, let’s benchmark the browser and see how the Pi 4 compares to the Pi 5, and this is an important one because a lot of people, when they're using that Raspberry Pi as their desktop, mainly use the browser.
It’s the main thing. So, let’s check it out. Pi 4, let’s go! I’m using Speedometer 2.0. Start the test. Lots of to-dos, that honestly kind of stressed me out, but let’s just drink some coffee and go with it. Okay, Pi 4, 19.2. Is that good? I’m not sure.
Let’s test it on the Pi 5. Ready, set, go! More stressful to-dos, I don’t like this. 54.6, are you kidding me? That’s pretty sick. GPU testing time! We’re going to play the game called Open Arena. Pi 4 is up first. 1280x720. Let’s see what happens. FPS is not great, we’re like under... okay, it’s killing, it’s dying, it’s dying, who’s that? Okay, it’s unplayable.
If I stay still, it’s 15 frames per second. I just want to kill someone, one person. That person was me. Time for the Pi 5, 1280x720p, let’s get started. So much better! Oh my gosh, look at the FPS! This is insane. The real test is if I can kill somebody now. I know people mod this to get better frame rates. This is just out of the box, I haven’t changed anything.
I got someone! Now, let’s dial it down just a bit more to make it more fair on the Pi 4. I’ll do 640x180. This is so tiny. How do I make this bigger? Let’s see what FPS we get here. I’m keeping all the same settings, not doing anything fancy at all. FPS is a lot better with nothing. Okay, so FPS is pretty good. Alright, same story on the Pi 5.
Let’s drop it down to, uh, what was it? 640x480. Super tiny, can barely see it. I better get like 3,000 FPS on this. Yeah, it’s ridiculous. Like, we’re hitting 100 FPS. Okay, we tested the Pis and clearly the Pi 5 is just... it’s ridiculous. It’s the winner. It only took four years, but at least it came out in 2023 and not in 2024, right Mr. Upton? Yes.
