CheckMag | The Raspberry Pi 5 is much more than a board for projects

Single board computers are often touted as project boards. The type of computing device that you might build into a homemade portable console, media centre or digital photo frame. However, the Raspberry Pi has often been marketed as an all on one computer solution for sectors that might operate on a limited budget, like education.

In all of its previous iterations, the Raspberry Pi has offered a sub par computing experience when used as a traditional computer replacement. Apps were slow to load, there was no physical on or off switch and the computational power available was barely able to handle basic web browsing.

That started to change with the Raspberry Pi 4, which was offered with between 2 GB and 8 GB RAM and dual 4K display outputs. However, the Pi 4 still felt sluggish when being used as a desktop.

Thankfully, that has now changed with the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 5. Offering similar 4 GB and 8 GB memory configurations as well as a native PCI bus and a power on and off switch.

The power supply with the Pi 5 has also been upgraded, now pushing up to 27 watts. Suggesting that the SOC pulls significantly more power. With more power comes more heat and the official Pi case now comes with an active fan. Even then, the only way to prevent any and all thermal throttling is to use the Pi 5 with the additional (official) heatsink and fan. 

The Pi 5 posted a Geekbench 6 single score of between 820 and 833 after 3 runs. Similar performance to a Ryzen 7 3780U or an i5-4258U from the Haswell era. While not competitive by today's standards, for a $100 board with a lightweight linux distribution there is plenty of power for basic computing tasks.

Even when running from a Micro SD card, the Raspberry Pi 5 seems suitably snappy to get some work done. Throw in the possibility of purchasing a NVME adapter board from either Pimoroni or Pineberry, the new Pi 5 no longer relies on the speed of inherently sluggish micro SD cards. Something like this MSI Spatium M371 (Available at Amazon*) could be an excellent way to add a terabyte of storage for very little money to your new Pi.

Coupled with the possibility of running a discrete GPU from the same PCI interconnect and plenty of headroom for overlocking, the Pi 5 is starting to look and feel more like a practical computer than something tinkerers use to get their projects off the ground.