The Raspberry Pi 5 is here! Our favourite credit card-sized computer has just gotten an update and we already have one here to take a look at, so let’s power it up, run some tests, and see what’s new!
(If you want to see a deeper dive into benchmarks or wish to see a bit more of our methodology, we also have a Pi 5 vs. Pi 4 article.)
Board Walkthrough
Our Pi 5 still comes in its loveable credit card size but the board has been shuffled around a bit to host some new features, so let's take a quick walkthrough of the board.
First off, the ethernet and USBs have been switched around (again), back to the original layout we saw with the Pi 3. The display and camera MIPI connectors have been moved to the bottom of the board, as well as the POE+ HAT connector. And unfortunately, the 4-pole stereo audio headphone jack is no longer on the board (insert some joke about Apple here).
This means that we will probably see very little compatibility with pi 4 cases and HATs.
But starting off our list of new additions is as always a new processor. Under the hood, we have a Cortex-A76 CPU clocked at 2.4 GHz, and a new VideoCore 7 GPU at 1 GHz. Raspberry Pi says that this will offer a considerable leap in performance, and we will get into the nitty gritty of that later with some benchmarks.
A very nice addition is the power button on the side of the board. The Pi 5 still boots up normally when plugged into a power source, exactly like the previous Pis, but not having to unplug and replug it in to turn it back on is a very welcomed feature. There are also some pinout terminals for this button if you wish to use your own power button.
We also have these 2 JST connectors in the bottom left of the board. One is for an RTC battery to power the new onboard real-time clock, meaning the Pi 5 can finally keep track of time when it is powered off and offline. The other connector is for an always active dedicated UART connector and is a nice little addition designed for debugging purposes.
The 40-pin connector hasn’t been touched so GPIO-based hats from the Pi 4 should still work. Next to it though, we now have a dedicated fan connector which pairs nicely with the 2 new dedicated heatsink mounting points (and spoiler alert, this board is really gonna make use of these).
We also now have a model indicator to easily see what size memory your Pi 5 has at a glance, just a very nice little touch. Speaking of memory the Pi 5 only comes in the same 1, 2, 4 and 8 GB sized models of the Pi 4, unfortunately, no 16 gig or larger sized models.
Very big news is the new RP1 chip sitting in the top right of the board, and as the big Raspberry Pi logo suggests, it is in-house manufactured silicon from Raspberry Pi themselves. This new chip handles all the i/o capabilities and seems to bring a decent step up in peripheral performance and functionality.
A few major things are the MIPI connectors now being upgraded to 4-lanes, previous Pis had 1 for a camera and 1 for a display, but they now can be used for both, so the Pi 5 can have 2 cameras OR 2 displays. They are a different connector to what was on the Pi 4, but adapter cables are readily available. (Something related worth mentioning is there is some more custom Raspberry Pi silicon for the ISP inside the processor, it now allows a gigapixel-a-second throughput, providing better camera image processing.)
We still have our 2 USB 2.0 and 2 USB 3.0 connectors, but the RP1 chip reportedly allows for simultaneous 5-gigabit throughput on both the USB 3.0 ports now.
Something we will be jumping into later is the improved SD card performance which has greatly been increased thanks to it being handled by the RP1 chip.
I think one of the most exciting features enabled by this custom i/o controller is a PCI-E interface. The Pi now has a single-lane PCI-E 2.0 interface which supports the new official m.2 HAT. We are very excited to see what can come of this and the ways that the community are going to find to utilise it.
All in all, some very welcomed additions on the Pi 5, some nice quality-of-life features like the power button and fan connector, and some possibly expanding features like the PCIE and dedicated UART connectors that we will be eagerly waiting to see how they will be used.
Benchmarks and Performance
Alright, some cool new flashy hardware, but let's get into some actual benchmarks. We will be benching it against the pi 4 and if you want to see some more in-depth benchmarking and comparisons, check out our pi 5 vs pi 4 video linked below.
So here is our great wall of benchmarks, in the synthetic CPU department (just pure number crunching), we saw about a 50% to 80% increase in processing power, but our real-world applications of compressing files, image editing, and web browsing saw somewhere between a 2 and 3 fold increase in performance. Either way, that Cortex-A76 is quick off the mark.
GPU benches were the same with rendering tests showing a doubling in performance, and when we booted up Openarena (the open-source Quake 3 clone) we got a tripling of fps over the Pi 4.
Memory benchmarks were a bit of a doozy with the Pi 5 coming in at about 5 times quicker, we don’t know what's going on there, a bit more on that in the comparison article, but it's fast in our RAMspeed benchmarks.
The MicroSD card performance was a big leap with about a doubling in sequential read and write, a historical chokepoint of the pis, that is very nice to see that the pi 5 is somewhat on the ball with that finally.
In terms of boot times, running Bookworm os on both the pi 4 and pi 5 we see that the pi 5 boots in just under 20 seconds, wow, that is way faster than the 35 seconds of the pi 4.
Again we have a more in-depth benchmarking video, where we explain a bit more what we did and also go over some additional benchmarks. But across all the tests, we think it's safe to say that the ballpark in terms of performance increase is at least 2 times, again, synthetics were on the lower side, but practicals were on the higher side.
The User Experience
In terms of general day-to-day usage, it also seems to be on the higher side, the pi 5 just seems a lot more responsive in general in browsing and day-to-day activities. This is personal opinion time, but I think the Pi 5 is a feasible desktop experience for light day-to-day activities. The Pi 4 could definitely do it, but it was just a little too slow, the pi 5 is fast enough that I wouldn’t get frustrated using it every day.
Whilst our stock Pi 4 had great issues with 720p60 fps YouTube playback, the Pi 5 had very few issues, a few minor frame drops here and there but I would say it is a smooth experience, and is something that will probably get better with software maturation and improved support. Using the Pi 5 at 4k is a much better experience than the Pi 4, and it obviously was a little slower than a 1080p or 1440p experience, but it was way smoother than the Pi 4.
We have also mentioned the new Bookworm OS, and although we are currently running an alpha version of it, it is quite nice. The Pi 4 seems to be a tad more responsive on it, and there are some nice new features like some cool alt tab animations, Firefox coming pre-installed on it, and now being able to change the resolution without restarting. We didn’t get a chance to dive too deep into it, but from a surface look, just a few nice additions here and there.
So overall, a very fast board and we think this overall roughly doubling of performance is a big win for the new pi 5.
Power and Cooling
With this comes, of course, a new official 27-watt power delivery enabled power supply, and a cool feature of this is that when the pi 5 detects this power supply, it allows a total of 1.6 amps to be drawn from the USB ports, up from the default 600 milliamps, meaning you there is plenty of power for USB SSDs, that is if you need them with the new PCIe interface.
We performed a power draw test using the Otiiarc and found that the Pi 5 drew about 500 milliamps during idle operation in a desktop environment with no peripherals plugged in, and 2.15 amps when under full load, with a keyboard, mouse and monitor plugged in. This is quite a bit more than the pi 4, which uses just under 300 milliamps at idle, and 1.3 amps under the same conditions. the Pi 5 CPU is on a 16 nm process architecture which is more efficient than the 28 nm on the Pi 4, but even with this, the Pi 5 draws a good chunk of power. We also used the Ottiiarc to measure boot times.
With this increase in power draw is an increase in cooling needs, and probably explains the dedicated heatsink mounting points and fan connector. However, we ran all of our tests on the Pi 5 with the official active cooler and had no thermal issues whatsoever. The fan didn’t spin up when under the thermal load of day-to-day activities, and when running stressberry, where we put the Pi under full load for half an hour, it had no thermal throttling and no issues with cooling, and the fan wasn’t even up on full speed most of the time.
So a decent heatsink and fan should be enough to cool a stock Pi 5, no thermal issues from what we have observed, and it's also worth mentioning the new official case comes with a heatsink and inbuilt fan now.
Accessories
A new Pi means new accessories, with the change in layout we have a new power over ethernet HAT and case. The new official case seems to be a bit more than previous cases as it has an actual fan inside it and, some nice slots for all your interface cables to run out of the case, and it's also stackable for any of your cluster needs. It seems that overall the pi 5 case has just had a lot more thought and effort put into it this generation.
There is also an official active cooler now available, which we have mentioned and seems to do a wonderful job keeping it cool.
There is also the M.2 HAT which will fit a small form factor M.2 SSD or other m.2 devices onto that PCIe interface, and we are very excited to see where that goes.
And of course, we have the other smaller official accessories, like camera and display adapter cables for the new MIPI connector, RTC battery, beginners guide etc.
Some Closing Thoughts
It's been a while since the last Pi launched and again this is early days, but for that wait, the Pi 5 has brought a wealth of new features and interfaces on the board, and a considerable leap forward in processing power. We think this new Pi will open up many new possibilities and applications with its new additions and is a very viable day-to-day desktop experience thanks to its increase in speed, which we think will enable people to do many things that were beyond the processing power of previous generations. And it's not that much more expensive. The new Pi 5 4GB and 8GB models are only about $5 USD more expensive than their Pi 4 counterparts.
That is a fantastic jump in speed, ability and features for such a small step in price...
