Finally, another generation of everyone’s favorite single-board computer, the Raspberry Pi, is shipping. After a long wait (from October 1st, 2023, until February 5th, 2024), I finally have the accessories and the Raspberry Pi 5 in my hands, and it was worth the wait.

When the original Raspberry Pi was launched in 2012 for $35 dollars, it spawned a revolution of single-board computers.  Computers that largely fit on a board roughly the size of a credit card. Now, on version 5, the Raspberry Pi 5 has some significant upgrades that make it even better than the previous generation.

Pick Your Pi

The Raspberry Pi 5 comes in two versions: 4 GB of RAM for $60 and 8 GB of RAM for $80. For the first time, the Pi has a chip developed in-house called the RP1.  The RP1 is the new Pi 5’s I/O board which provides most of the I/O for the Raspberry Pi 5.  That chip adds to the Pi:

• 4-lane PCIe 2.0 endpoint
• Gigabit Ethernet MAC
• 2× USB 3 host controllers
  • Each has 1× USB 3 and 1× USB 2 port
  • More than twice the usable USB bandwidth vs. Raspberry Pi 4
• 2× SDIO ports/eMMC (not used on Raspberry Pi 5)
• 2× MIPI transceivers (4-lane, supporting DSI and CSI-2)
• Video DAC (3-channel, supporting PAL/NTSC and VGA)
  • Only one channel (composite) used on Raspberry Pi 5
• Low-speed peripherals (SPI, UART, I2C, PWM, GPIO, I2S)
• Delta-sigma PWM audio out

For the first time, the Raspberry Pi will be able to have an M2 format SSD drive and boot from it.  The Pi Foundation is working on its hat to add this ability to the Pi, but that hasn’t stopped others like Vilros from developing their own M2 hat for the Pi 5. Also, Geekworm has brought out their version, which lets you add not one but 2 full-size M2 drives to the Raspberry Pi 5.

Now, it is important to note that the Geekworm board will only allow you to use the storage on the M2 drives. Their board does not support booting off of the M2 drive, but that’s still an amazing piece of kit that allows you to have terabytes of storage that you can use with your Raspberry Pi 5 to make a NAS device or media server for your home network. Previously, the only way to do this was with external storage on USB-based drives. This makes the Pi 5 a desirable board for the home user and hacker, mainly for storage. Still, as I have, the 8 GB model makes this a desktop replacement device for those who need a computer for e-mail, casual web browsing, and even document creation.

The 4 GB version of the Pi 4 also did this, as did its 8 GB version, which came out after the initial launch of the Raspberry Pi 4. This entire article will be authored on my Raspberry Pi 5 using the Chromium browser on Ubuntu. Only image editing will be done externally because I love to use Lightroom to edit my pictures. Now, if Adobe made Creative Cloud for Linux AND the ARM processor, I could do that here, too. As much as I like Linux, open-source photo editors like The Gimp and Darktable do not compare to Adobe’s tools.  Sorry Linux friends.  You may disagree, but I said it.

 

My Pi

I also ordered the official Raspberry Pi Foundation case for the Raspberry Pi 5, which comes with a fan built into the case and a heatsink for the CPU, so if you don’t want to order the official CPU cooler, you can get by with that but…the cooler is only $5 to $6.50.  The only negative is that the cooler that clips onto the Pi 5 board will not work with the fan that comes with the case. Fortunately, you can remove the case section that holds the fan if you do, like I did, and use the official cooler as well. The only negative to the official case is you need to like white and pinkish red, which are the official colors of the Pi Foundation, or black/grey. The only colors available for the official case.

They also released a new power supply for the Rasberry Pi 5 as the new board needs more power than the previous generation. The supply is available in black or white and only costs $8.

Finally, the board itself also comes with a real-time clock chip, which you can add a battery to so that it keeps the time between boots.

Another welcome addition to the board is a button for turning it on!  It always supported this with the onboard connections, but the board now has this. It makes it even nicer when using it as a desktop as you can shut it down, and with one press of the button, it boots up again and even the official case has accommodations for this built-in button.

The full specs:

• VideoCore VII GPU, supporting OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan 1.2
• Dual 4Kp60 HDMI® display output with HDR support
• 4Kp60 HEVC decoder
• LPDDR4X-4267 SDRAM – 8GB
• Dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth 5.0 / Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
• microSD card slot, with support for high-speed SDR104 mode
• 2 × USB 3.0 ports, supporting simultaneous 5Gbps operation
• 2 × USB 2.0 ports
• Gigabit Ethernet, with PoE+ support (requires separate PoE+ HAT)
• 2 × 4-lane MIPI camera/display transceivers
• PCIe 2.0 x1 interface for fast peripherals (requires separate M.2 HAT or other adapter)
• 5V/5A DC power via USB-C, with Power Delivery support
• Raspberry Pi standard 40-pin header
• Real-time clock (RTC), powered from external battery
• Power button

Overall, each generation of the Pi has improved on the previous generation, but I think other boards are starting to eclipse the Pi in power. The support will always be better on the Pi as it’s massively popular, and there are thousands of different things you can do with this powerful little board.

Stay tuned to itechgear.org for my plans for my pi…beyond just using it to write this article!