I’ve had some 48 hours to look at the Raspberry Pi 5, and I’ve developed some respect for the hardware. This is in contrast to my “meh” attitude back in September when I commented on its initial announcement. I’ve sorta kicked the tires a bit and taken out for a test drive, and I must admit to being satisfied, especially with the right distribution installed. Let me get this out of the way first: I tried to install Fedora 39 for AArch64 and it failed to install. No problem, as both the latest Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu 23.10 for the Raspberry Pi 5 (hereafter referred to as RPi 5) installed just fine, thank-you-very-much.
The latest RPi 5 is the same physical dimensions as all the other Pi SBCs that have come before it. The only major physical change is swapping the USB ports with the physical Ethernet port; they are now re-organized as they were on all Pi SBCs before the RPi 4 was released. Everything else remains the same as on the RPi 4, such as USB-C for power and the micro HDMI ports.
My RPi 5 is in a Vilros PI 5 Active Cooler Compatible Case because that was how I had to purchase the RPi 5 active cooler. Normally the active cooler is US$5, but they were all sold out, and this combination was purchased from Amazon for around US$12. The Vilros case was a reasonable compromise to protect the board and keep it from accidentally shorting out if the bottom of the board came into contact with any conductive surface, as well as providing physical protection for the active cooler with its fan. With the top in place there’s still enough room to plug in a cable to access the GPIO pins. As far as a hat is concerned, it won’t work with this style. Once the market for RPi 5 cases settles down a bit I will probably look for something else, but until then it’s all I have, so it’s good that it’s actually useful in a control office/home setting.
One rather interesting feature is the pushbutton power switch on the same edge as the micro SDXC card socket. I’ve tried it out and it does work; press it when the board is on and running an operating system, and the operating system will immediately pop up a dialog saying it is shutting down in 60 seconds, and begins to count down. After shutdown the green power LED goes red, indicating that power is still supplied to the board. Press it again, and the board starts right back up.
Speaking of starting up, with Ubuntu 23.10 AArch64 installed it powers on and to a desktop in under five seconds. I’ve timed it. This fits in with the overall smooth and snappy performance of Ubuntu on this hardware. Right now I couldn’t be more pleased, but give it time, and I’m sure to find something to complain about.
If I could compare the overall performance at this time with other computers I own, I’d have to say it performs at the same level as my old Samsung R580 from 2010 and my current work Linux box, a Minis Forum U250. Both of these systems have 16GB of memory, and both are running an i5 or i5 equivalent from AMD. They’re multi-core, and for the Minis Forum, hyper-threaded as well. And yet if you sat me down in front of all three as a blind test with the same display and keyboard I don’t think I could tell them apart performance wise, without digging in with some utilities.
It will be interesting to see how this newest Raspberry Pi matures over time, and the type of Raspberry Pi comes in the future.
Links
raspberry pi (ancient Pi in plastic case February 2014) — /2014/02/26/new-bits-for-the-raspberry-pi/
raspberry pi (my first Pi from January 2014) — /2014/01/28/raspberry-pi/
Radarwitch