The Raspberry Pi 5 is here. Our favourite Single-Board Computer has just gotten a major update with a ton of exciting new features, and we have one right here. So let's take a look. Our Pi 5 still comes in its lovable 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 new board.

First off, the Ethernet and the USB have been switched around again, back to the original layout we saw. The display and MIPI connectors have been moved to the bottom right here, as well as the PoE HAT connector, and the 4-pole stereo audio headphone jack is no longer on the board. This means we'll probably see very little compatibility with Pi 4 cases. 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 out of the box, 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 this power button on the side here. It still boots up like normally when plugged in, exactly like the previous Pis, but not having to unplug and replug it to turn it back on is a very nice and welcomed feature. There are also some pinout terminals here if you wanted to use your own power button. We also have these two JST connectors on the bottom here. One is for an RTC battery to power the new onboard real-time clock, meaning your Pi can finally keep a track of time when it's powered off and offline. Very, very nice. The other one is for an always-active dedicated UART connector, and it's a nice little addition for debugging purposes.

As far as we're aware, the 40-pin connector hasn't been touched, so GPIO-based HATs from the Pi 4 should still work on the Pi 5. Next to it, though, we have a dedicated fan connector, which pairs nicely to these new two heatsink mounting points. And spoiler alert, this board is probably going to make use of these.

We also now have a dedicated model indicator here. Well, that might be a bit too small, but you can now tell what size memory Pi 5 you have just at a glance. Speaking of memory, the Pi 5 only comes in the same 1, 2, 4, and 8GB-sized models. Unfortunately, no 16GB or larger-sized models. Very big news, though, is the new RP1 chip sitting right here. I don't know if you can see it, there's a little Raspberry Pi logo on it, and as that suggests, this is in-house manufactured silicon from Raspberry Pi themselves. This new chip handles all the I-O capabilities on the Pi 5, and it seems to bring a decent step up in peripheral performance and functionality. Well, that's a tongue twister.

A few major things of this new RP1 chip are the MIPI connectors here. Previously, the Pi had one for a camera and one for a display, but they can now be used for both, so the Pi 5 can have two cameras or two displays. They are a different connector as to what was on the Pi 4, but adapter cables are available.

On a related note, there is also some more custom Raspberry Pi silicon for the ISP inside the processor here. It now allows a gigapixel a second throughput, providing better camera image processing. We still have our two USB 2.0 and 3.0 connectors, but the RP1 chip reportedly allows for simultaneous 5 gigabit throughput on both of the USB 3.0s now.

Something we will be jumping a bit more into later is the improved SD card performance, which has greatly been increased thanks to it being handled by the RP1 chip. And I think that one of the most exciting features enabled by this custom IO controller is this PCIe interface here.

The Pi 5 now has a single lane Gen 2 PCI interface, which supports the new official M.2 hat, and we are very excited to see what can come of this and the ways that the community are going to find to utilize 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 possibility expanding features like the PCIe and dedicated UART connectors that we will be eagerly awaiting to see how they will be used.

All right, some 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 benching and comparisons, check out our Pi 4 vs Pi 5 video linked below.

So here is our great wall of benchmarks, and as you can see in the synthetic CPU department, just pure number crunching, we saw about a 50-80% 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 benchmarks were about the same, with rendering tests showing a doubling in performance, and when we booted up Open Arena, the open-source Quake 3 clone, we got a tripling of FPS over the Pi 4.

Memory benchmark was a bit of a doozy, with the Pi 5 coming in at about 5 times quicker than the 4. We don't know what's going on there, a bit more of that in the comparison video, but it's fast in our RAM speed benchmarks. And we can see a big leap in microSD card. Performance-wise, the Pi 5 has shown a significant improvement over the Pi 4. Sequential read and write speeds have doubled, which is a major improvement considering it has been a historical bottleneck for the Pi. Boot times have also improved, with the Pi 5 booting in under 20 seconds compared to the 35 seconds on the Pi 4. This makes it a much more convenient and enjoyable experience to use the Pi 5.

In our more in-depth benchmarking video, we explain the tests we conducted and provide additional benchmarks. Overall, it's safe to say that the Pi 5 offers at least a 2 times performance increase. Synthetic benchmarks showed a slight increase, but practical day-to-day usage demonstrated a more significant improvement. The Pi 5 feels much more responsive in a desktop environment, making browsing and general activities smoother and more enjoyable. In my personal opinion, the Pi 5 is a viable option for light day-to-day activities as a desktop experience. The Pi 4 could handle it, but there were times when it felt a bit too slow. However, the Pi 5 is fast enough that I wouldn't get frustrated using it on a daily basis.

When it comes to media playback, the Pi 5 performs well. While the stock Pi 4 had some issues with 720p 60fps YouTube playback, the Pi 5 had very few issues with 1080p 60fps playback. There may be a few minor frame drops, but overall, it provides a smooth experience. With further software improvements, this performance is likely to get even better. Improved support. Using the Pi 5 at 4K is actually quite a nice experience. It was obviously a little slower than a 1080 or 1440p experience, but it was way smoother than the 4. And that brings up another point. Under the hood of the processor is an improved HVS and display pipeline, meaning that the Pi 5 now supports dual 4K60 HDMI display outputs. The Pi 4 only supported dual 4K30 outputs, and the user experience with this dual configuration on the Pi 5 is usable. Nothing to write home about, but the single 4K screen experience is obviously a much better option.

But I don't know if I'd be using the dual 4K for day-to-day desktop experiences, but dual 1080p was quite a nice experience. We've also mentioned the new Bookworm OS, and although we're currently running an alpha version of it, it is very nice. The Pi 4 seems to be a tad more responsive when running on it, and there are a few nice little features here and there, like this cool alt-tab animation, Firefox now comes pre-installed on it, and you can now change the resolution without restarting it. We didn't get a chance to really deep, deep dive into it, but from a surface look, just a few nice little additions here and there.

So overall, a very fast board, and we think this roughly doubling of performance is a big win for the Pi 5. At the cost of this increased processing power is yet another creep in power requirements though. A bit more of a jump this time than the last, with the recommended input power increasing to 5 volt 5 amps, up from the 5 volt 3 amps of the Pi 4. It booted fine on the Pi 4 power supply, and seemed to be perfectly usable on it, but we didn't do any serious benchmarking on it.

Of course, you want to power the Pi 5 with the new power supply to ensure optimal performance. Official 27-watt Power Delivery enabled power supply. A cool new feature of this is that when the Pi 5 detects it, it allows a total of 1.6 amps to be drawn from the USB ports. This is up from the default 600 milliamps, meaning that there is plenty of power available for your USB SSDs, that is if you need them with the new PCIe interface.
 We performed a power draw test using the Audi Arc and found that the Pi 5 drew about 500 milliamps during idle operation in a desktop environment with no peripherals or monitor plugged in, and about 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 about 300 milliamps at idle and about 1.3 amps when under the same conditions under load.

The new Pi 5 CPU is on a 16 nanometer process architecture, which is more efficient than the 28 nanometer on the Pi 4, but even with this, the Pi 5 still draws a good chunk of power. With this increase in power draw is an increase in cooling needs, and probably explains the heatsink mounting points and the dedicated fan connector here.

However, we ran all of our tests with the official Pi 5 active cooler, and we had no thermal issues whatsoever. The fan didn't even spin up when under the thermal load of day-to-day activities and just general browsing. And when running Stressberry, where we put the Pi under full load for half an hour, it had no thermal throttling whatsoever and no issues with cooling. The fan wasn't even up on full speed most of the time. So it does run hot, but a decent heatsink and fan should be enough to cool a stock Pi 5. A new Pi means new accessories. With the change in layout, we have a new Power over Ethernet hat, which will also support. The new power delivery requirements, and as mentioned, we have a new official case. This new case seems to be a bit of a step up from the previous generation cases, as it actually has an inbuilt fan in it. We also have some nice slots for 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 love and thought put into it this generation. There is also an official active cooler, a big hunk of metal with a blower fan, and as we've mentioned, it seems to do a really good job of keeping it cool. There is also the M.2 hatch, 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 a whole bunch of other official accessories, like camera and display adapter cables for the new MIPI interface, RTC batteries, and the beginner's guide, etc, etc. So it's been a while since the last Pi launched, and again, this is very early days, but for that wait, the Pi 5 seems to have brought a wealth of new features and interfaces on the board, as well as a considerable leap forward in processing power.

We think that this new Pi is going to open up many new possibilities and applications with these new additions, and it's also a very viable day-to-day desktop experience, thanks to its increase in speed. We also think that this speed will enable people to do many things that were beyond the processing power of previous generations. And the Pi 5 is not that much more expensive. The 4 and 8GB models of the Pi 5 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 reasonable price.  A small step in price. Till next time.