Raspberry Pi 5 Review : Is it still a viable low cost general PC?

hey everybody it's lony and we're taking a look today at the Raspberry Pi five this is the newest single board computer from the Raspberry Pi Foundation they are a nonprofit and we've been looking at these ever since I started the channel and one of the things that I've always liked about them is that they're very lowc cost but they can do quite a bit although over the last couple of years their Flagship device the main Raspberry Pi computer has been creeping up in price and now we're at a point where where they're not all that less expensive than an Intel or AMD based Mini PC which can do a lot more so in this video we're going to take a look at this but also bring up some mini PCS that don't cost all that much more and see how those might compare performance-wise to this ones we've got a lot to take a look at today but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that I paid for this with my own funds all the opinions you're about to hear are my own no one is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you're about to see before it was uploaded so let's get into it now now and see what the new Pi five is all about now the Raspberry Pi we're looking at today is their 8 gbyte model the retail price on this is $8 for the board you should not pay more than that and I bought mine from py shop. us they are one of the official Raspberry Pi Distributors they happen to have it in stock as I was browsing around to see if anyone had any and as you can see right now they are once again out of stocks I must have gotten in at the right time there is also right now a 4 gbyte version that sells for $60 but those are the only two that I can see that are currently available now remember when you buy one of these things you're just getting the board and you still need to get other stuff to make it work so if you start looking at the price escalation here you're looking at another 10 bucks for a case with a cooling fan uh with these new raspberry pies they do run a little hotter so you'll probably want to get that also you will need at least a power supply for it and although it uses USBC power here and it's PD compatible I'm finding that most USBC power supplies do not support the 5 volts and 5 amps that this device requires and what you're likely going to see with a regular USB CPD power supply is a warning message that tells you that you don't have enough power to send the maximum amperage to your usba ports here I also got this message with a number of large USBC power supplies that I tried with it when I was really pushing the computer hard on some benchmarks so I think getting the official power supply or at least one that is rated for 5 volts and 5 amps is going to be important and you can see here just with those two items the case and the power supply we're already over $100 even before we look at the SD card that we need to boot it up and of course the HDMI cables that we need to plug it into a display now if we take a look at the market right now for intel-based Mini PC I found this one here from chewy for 189 bucks that has just about everything you need to get started including 12 gigs of RAM a 512 gab SSD Windows 11 built in so the price Delta here is not much more and you get a lot here in fact right now on Amazon there's a $30 coupon it's not the highest quality PC in the world but if you're looking to experiment with Linux or just trying to do some different things with Windows the price difference is not significant and you can get a computer that's ready to go out of the box versus a project here with the Raspberry Pi and of course this is running with a less powerful processor than what you might get out of an Intel n100 so just keep that in mind I'm thinking that uh the Raspberry Pi is not as interesting to me as a Computing alternative anymore due to the fact that its price is going up while all the Intel mini PCS are coming down now In fairness there are still very affordable raspberry pies out there like like the Raspberry Pi 02w this device has Wi-Fi built in it's a full-blown computer for 15 bucks and there are some other options too that you can get up and running for even less than that so they are still uh definitely leading the charge on lowcost computers but their Flagship here is just getting closer to where other lowcost computers are now now as far as this device is concerned as you heard at the beginning I did get the one with 8 GB of RAM it has a new processor on board that is significantly more powerful than the last one this is a broadcom BCM 2712 it's a 64bit arm cortex a76 CPU with four cores and it runs at 2.4 GHz like the prior models you've got Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on here so once you power it up and connect it to a display you can get it on your network I was not impressed with the Wi-Fi performance on this it was about the same as the prior version it's a 1ex one AC Wi-Fi Radio 5 GHz Herz doesn't support Wi-Fi 6 it's usable but not all that fast but you do have some other networking options uh which is its gigabit Ethernet port on here and like the prior Edition you now get full gigabit speed out of this as you can see in the speed test that I ran earlier so we're able to get essentially full gigabit up and down uh using my internet speed test there so if you were thinking about using this as a server you do have the bandwidth to make it happen and your applications now that you have a faster processor should run a little bit better like prior versions you've got two usb3 ports here and two USB 2.0 ports this is not compatible with Raspberry Pi 4 cases so if you have a case for the four it's not going to fit this one even though things look to be in the same place it's not the exact same so you will need to get different cases now like the prior Edition there is a Poe header here so if you wanted to power this over ethernet you could do that if you purchased an additional peripheral for that over here you've got two headers for attaching uh displays or cameras and these are different than the pi 4's uh camera header so you'll need to make sure you get the right cable for that one thing that I'm not happy about on this new one is that they're sticking with these micro HDMI connectors so you do need to make sure you've got the right cable here for video output this device now will support 4K 60 out of both of these ports although it still feels a bit sluggish when you're running at that resolution so I think 1080p is still The Sweet Spot for using this computer but it will output at 4K 60 and we'll look at the performance of its 4K output in a minute here is that USB type-c port for power I think it would be great if they could integrate video output into that USBC Port I think it would make things a lot easier you could attach a docking station and be off and running but unfortunately this is for power only here on the bottom you've got your SD card slot for booting it up you can boot off of the USB also uh but for this video we'll be booting it up the uh way that they kind of assume you'll Boot It Up which is off of the SD card now new on this device is a PCI uh header here where you can attach PCI Express devices and there are now some uh ways that you can attach faster Storage nvme storage through this header here which we'll explore in a future video so they have given you some more IO options and of course you've got the gpio pins up here uh which are kind of the staple of the Raspberry Pi ecosystem and there's all sorts of things that you can do from a project standpoint by attaching things to these pins and this is why this is such a popular device uh for makers because this is kind of a standard now and every raspberry Pi has these GPO connections for attaching other devices to it now another new thing they have this year is a power switch so you can actually turn it on and off without having to unplug power and reattach and that switch of course is right here and I'm sure there are cases that make use of that switch as well it will boot up by default just by plugging something into it so if you are looking to run this headless it'll perform the same way the old one did but now you have the option of a switch that's built in it doesn't require any extra scripts to get working so lots of neat upgrades to this but let's take a look now and see how this performs again we're looking at this as a general computing device in this video and we're going to boot it up and run some general computing tasks and see how it does let's get to it all right so we've got it booted up here we're going to start off in 4k although I'm going to switch it down to 1080p in a little bit because I do think it performs a lot better at the lower resolution now this is the raspian OS and this is the operating system that the Raspberry Pi Foundation maintains we're going to just load up a web browser here real quick the Chromium browser just to see how it performs we're going to go over to the nasa.gov homepage and it's not bad although it does feel noticeably more sluggish in the 4K resolution than it does at 1080p so you can see some pages here do take a little while to render especially if you got a lot of photos coming in on screen it's still not quite too where it needs to be as a 4K PC even though it can output at that resolution I'm going to close this up real quick though and boot up a 4K test video image in VC this actually plays back just fine provided you don't pull down any menus or anything so this is an HC 10bit file that is running at 250 megabits per second at 4K so at least the hevc decoding seems to work okay on this device here but again a lot of what you're going to experience at the higher resolution is a bit sluggish let's turn it down to 1080p now and see how it does all right so now we are running at 1080p so let's take a look at that web page again we were just on the nasa.gov homepage and as you'll see here things do spring up a little quicker now that we're at the lower resolution the system seems to be able to handle that a little better if I go back to this image archive it still takes a little bit of time for things to render in but it's not nearly as slow as it was before by the way we have been running on ethernet the whole time both at this resolution and at 4K so not bad again A little sluggish versus what you might get out of an Intel Mini PC these days but it is functional and a lot faster than the prior version now YouTube playback unfortunately is not so great on the pi five out of either browser here is a YouTube video from my YouTube channel playing at for K YouTube would only deliver me the 1080p version of that video and as you can see here when the pi is set to a 4K resolution it is pretty much unwatchable we're dropping a lot of frames and things look very jumpy as you can see on screen here 1080p fares better but it's still dropping a lot of frames it's not as noticeable though so I wasn't noticing frame drops as it was playing back but as you can see there on the stats for nerds we are getting very frequent frame dropping out of those videos even at the lower resolution so here an Intel Mini PC or an AMD Mini PC would do a lot better and on the browser bench. org speedometer benchmark test we got a score of 64.6 on the pi five which is considerably better than what we saw out of the pi4 back in 2019 now In fairness the pi4 has seen some optimization since then but still the pi5 is much faster with its new processor however take a look at the chart here at the Intel n100 in a Lenovo Chromebook that we looked at recently along with the n95 that we looked at in a small uh Windows Bas Mini PC those chips do considerably better when it comes to web browsing now although you can't get Microsoft Office for the Raspberry Pi you can get Libre office which is a great open-source office suite and we'll load up a test document here to see how everything performs and again this is at 1080p it does take a little bit of time for the initial screen here to render in but once it does it's not bad and it's usable although again I think an Intel or AMD Mini PC is going to feel a little quicker than the pi five does here even for doing Simple tasks like what you see here so again okay but not great and if I was paying half this price I'd be happy with it but now that we're getting close to Mini PC territory here I think the performance could be a little better now one of the more popular uses for the Raspberry Pi is video game emulation and things are looking a lot better on this new pie here I've got the Gamecube Emulator called Dolphin running and as you can see there on the right we're pretty much running this game which is burnout 2 at full speed we haven't been able to get uh this level of performance out of Prior editions of the Raspberry Pi it feels a bit buggy to me I'm getting some warning messages popping up from time to time as you can see the screen is flickering there a little bit but this is pretty much the base settings here and we're seeing really good GameCube performance at least for games that are not all that demanding on the GameCube platform and that was really nice to see here a little bit earlier I did test out some Dreamcast emulation and that also ran quite nicely here too so the bar is going up here on these raspberry pies in so far as their game emulation performance is concerned and I think if you were looking to upgrade from a pi 3 or four you'll definitely be able to do more with the five than you could before now I was able to run the geek bench Benchmark on the pi5 and there I got a single core score of 784 and a multi-core score of 1,416 the larkbox X which I referenced at the beginning of this video with the Intel n100 though does perform a lot better as you can see here especially on the multicore side but still a nice performance boost out of the new Pi versus what we've seen in Prior iterations so where am I at on the Raspberry Pi 5 well I do think it is a major improvement over the prior Edition because it performs a lot better than the other one did that was certainly evident during our game emulation tests but also if you're using one of these for a home lab server where you're running Docker containers and that sort of thing you've got a lot of RAM on this 8 gigabyte version available to you you also have a lot more performance available to you as well and I think you can do a lot with a very power efficient package here but if you were looking for a very inexpensive general computing device at the risk of sounding like a broken record I think some of those Intel and AMD based mini PCS are worth looking at as an alternative because you're not going to pay all that much more and you're going to get a lot more performance a lot more storage and something that is ready to go out of the box without a lot of additional accessories necessary and of course those mini PCS run Linux just as well as the pi does here and you'll have a selection of many more distributions to choose from as well you could even run the raspian OS on one of the devices too so I would look there first for general computing before here but if you are someone who gets a lot of value out of the Raspberry Pi if you're a maker and often making use of the connectivity options on the P I think this is a major Improvement if you can find one that's going to do it for now until next time this is lon Sabin thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lon.tv supporters including gold level supporters Brian Parker budley hot sauce and video games Steve Green and om de brown if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lon.tv support to learn more and don't forget to subscribe visit lon.tv SLS

Channel: Lon.TV

Views: 15,863

Keywords: Raspberry Pi 5, Pi 5, Pi, review, mini PC, vs. N100, Pi vs. n100, reviews, gaming, emulation, dolphin, Lon Seidman, Lon Reviews Tech, Lon.TV

Id: 9DfK1cFuQ9M

Length: 16min 52sec (1012 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2024