Raspberry Pi 5 Review: A New Standard for Makers (Updated)

The first new flagship Pi in four years was worth the wait.

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Raspberry Pi 5
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Tom's Hardware Verdict

The Raspberry Pi 5 is significantly faster than its predecessor while costing almost the same price. Its only drawback, which is likely temporary, is that some older HATs and add-ons may not have have software support right away.

Reasons to buy

  • +

    Massive speed boost

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    Dual camera / display support

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    Power button

  • +

    Real-time clock built-in

Reasons to avoid

  • -

    HATs Need Software Updates to Run Properly

  • -

    Needs active cooling

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    Small price increase

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Update 5/22/2024 02:55 PT

The first six months of the Raspberry Pi 5 have passed and in that time we have seen a plethora of products released in support of the flagship board. The latest being the official Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ which provides access to fast and cheap NVMe storage. Supporting the many M.2 NVMe based boards, such as Pimoroni's NVMe Base and Pineboard's HAT Drives we see a new firmware from Raspberry Pi which offers the ability to use two NVMe drives with the Raspberry Pi 5. One is used as a boot device, the other for mass storage.

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Les Pounder
Les Pounder
Associate Editor

Les Pounder is an associate editor at Tom's Hardware. He is a creative technologist and for seven years has created projects to educate and inspire minds both young and old. He has worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write and deliver their teacher training program "Picademy".

34 Comments Comment from the forums
  • bit_user
    An an early adopter and proponent of the original Raspberry Pi, and subsequently someone rather disgruntled by the Pi's slow pace of system-level upgrades, I should be excited by this new arrival. Instead, my first reaction is one of annoyance.

    I'm annoyed because, instead of simply keeping mum on the subject, the message just a hair over 9 months ago seemed loud and clear that there'd be no Raspberry Pi 5 until at least sometime in 2024.
    https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-5-after-2023
    I don't like to be jerked around, even if the expectation is set low and then surpassed. He had to know that they were on track for a possible 2023 delivery. I can certainly understand not wanting to set an expectation they couldn't deliver, but if there was a realistic possibility, then maybe also don't tell us it's not going to happen, when it actually might?
    Reply
  • Giroro
    Its worth noting that the cheap stick-on heat sinks will have that same problem they've always had: they don't use thermally conductive tape.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    As for the specs:
    SpecMFWReason4x Arm Cortex-A76: )I was betting on 4x A75, since the Pi SoC tend to be made on older nodes than their competition and the A75 is smaller.RAM: /It's great to see the additional speed, but I hope there will eventually be a 16 GiB option. It might be less necessary with only 4 cores, but having a few browser windows/tabs open can quickly chew through a mere 8 GiB.Power consumption: (This continues a troubling trend, although it's better than I'd have guessed, given how much faster it is.Storage: (While it's good that they're up to 104 MB/s, that's still lagging behind eMMC.PCIe: (PCIe 2.0 x1 is only 500 MB/s. That's almost fast enough to max a SATA 3 SSD, but x1 is narrower than competitors' and means you have to decide between fast storage (thanks to no eMMC) or anything else you'd want it for.RTC: )I once got bit by this, after taking the Pi's miniSD card out and mounting it from another machine. When I later tried to boot the Pi, it complained the timestamps were out-of-sync, so I had to look up how to patch their little hacked up solution.2 × 4-lane MIPI transceivers: )I haven't connected any cameras to mine, but this sounds like a nice improvement.VideoCore VII GPU: (With nothing actually written about this, it's hard for me to say anything specific. However the VideoCore GPUs have been a sore spot of the Pi's for a while, as they've fallen far behind the competition.NPU: (Where is it? However, my preference would be if they used the GPU for double-duty, so we'd get both a half-decent NPU and more GPU power. I guess I'll have to wait and see if that's the case.Price: )Assuming you can actually get one at these prices, essentially holding the line on pricing is a very nice achievement.
    Regarding other aspects of the review:
    "Buying cheap heat sinks is a waste of money."Yes, although it helps if you buy copper ones, thoroughly remove the adhesive TIM and apply a good PC heatsink compound, like Arctic MX-4. If you're not going to mount it upside down or sideways, you don't need adhesive or mechanical restraints.

    "Video Playback and Streaming"Sounds like it's doing software decoding. Even so, that still sounds pretty bad, but let's wait & hope for proper GPU acceleration.

    "Emulation Performance"I'd be surprised if the Pi's GPU didn't become an issue, for some of the more recent platforms mentioned.

    "We don’t reach the lofty heights of the Khadas VIM4, Edge2 Pro or the LattePanda Sigma, but then again we’re not spending that amount of money."The Orange Pi 5 (no relation) demands to be acknowledged. Yes, it doesn't have the same degree of community support, but it's got better specs in some key areas, competitive pricing, and up to 32 GiB of RAM. Not to mention the new "plus" model, for those willing to spend a bit more.
    http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontrollers/details/Orange-Pi-5.htmlhttp://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontrollers/details/Orange-Pi-5-plus.html
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Giroro said:
    Its worth noting that the cheap stick-on heat sinks will have that same problem they've always had: they don't use thermally conductive tape.
    Thermally-conductive tape exists, but you're right that one must look for assurance and evidence that it's been used, rather than to simply assume it was.

    Even so, it's not as good as a decent heatsink paste, so I always thoroughly clean off any tape and use a known-good TIM.
    Reply
  • evdjj3j
    Giroro said:
    50% more money for only 4 gigs more ram. Yikes.
    And it still can't play Youtube videos well.
    Reply
  • Jay Emm
    "The first new flagship Pi in four years was worth the wait."

    Well, not for me: still limited to 8GB RAM, still only 4 CPU cores, still no hardware video encoding; on just these 3 aspects, the Pi 5 didn't catch up to where the competition was years ago.

    The PCI interface is nice, but even the CM4 module had it already (to say nothing of the competition), so that's not earth-shaking by any means.

    Ditto RTC, power button and better cooling, as both have been available from many 3rd parties for a long time now.

    And the performance claim to "2 to 3 times" also seem greatly exaggerated: TH's own testing shows less than 2x and that's on *synthetic* benchmarks, real world tests are showing about 50%... so nothing revolutionary here either.

    And power usage is, for me, a major no-no: almost 3x the power at idle (which is where my telemetry systems, and I bet most IoT use cases, spend most of their time) is really disappointing, and will surely limit it's useful for battery-based applications like mine.

    I think Raspberry is relying too much on brand recognition and community support instead of good hardware, and that's not good.

    So, definitely not worth the wait for me, and I will probably head to the competition when the time comes to upgrade my Pi4 systems.
    Reply
  • peachpuff
    Wish they would fix their supply issues first then release a new one.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Jay Emm said:
    And the performance claim to "2 to 3 times" also seem greatly exaggerated: TH's own testing shows less than 2x and that's on *synthetic* benchmarks, real world tests are showing about 50%... so nothing revolutionary here either.
    Yes, it was exaggerated, but the TensorFlow Lite benchmark showed a 3.18x improvement, and that's not synthetic.

    In Phoronix' testing, they found the geomean was 2.76 times that of the Pi 4, although their testsuite is a mix of synthetic and real applications.

    Jay Emm said:
    power usage is, for me, a major no-no: almost 3x the power at idle (which is where my telemetry systems, and I bet most IoT use cases, spend most of their time) is really disappointing, and will surely limit it's useful for battery-based applications like mine.
    Indeed, the high idle power is somewhat unexpected. I wonder if that's from the fast memory, in which case maybe a solution would be to reduce the memory clock, for those who can afford to?

    Jay Emm said:
    I think Raspberry is relying too much on brand recognition and community support instead of good hardware, and that's not good.
    I think it's their Broadcom affiliation that's both a blessing and a curse.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    peachpuff said:
    Wish they would fix their supply issues first then release a new one.
    That's what they said was going to be their approach, in the article I linked (above).

    I wonder what changed. Was it their partnership with Sony? Fears about RK3588-based boards stealing attention and marketshare?
    Reply
  • Findecanor
    The power consumption at idle is disappointing.
    The Raspberry Pis are getting less and less usable as embedded machines for hobbyists projects, and more like ARM -based "NUC"s.
    But then again, the point of the Raspberry Pi from Broadcom's perspective is to be able to use the them to off-load their older SoCs, and the usual story is that using a brand-new SoC would have increased costs. (This is an older SoC, right?)

    While the PCIe connector is something people have requested for years, the way it would be used with a hat isn't optimal. You'd have to either place it on high risers, go without a cooling fan or place it below the main board — and get the cable blocking the SD-card slot.

    The most significant improvement IMHO is that it finally comes with a power switch as standard, so that you won't need a third-party solution to avoid corrupting the SD-card.

    I may be in the minority, but I've used the headphone jack.
    Reply