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Boards and maker kit · Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi 5

64owners with an opinion
59%of verdicts positive
31/22positive/negative since 2024
1 yrslongest happy owner
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and value; criticized for reliability.

What owners wrote

Doesn’t like itOwned 1 year
Can confirm, I've got a pi 5 here that's been running 24/7 for over a year (possibly two)... it boots fine, but anything else makes it run so slowly because the sdcard is trashed. The current setup writes to the systemd journal at least twice every minute... It's next iteration is getting a proper nvme.
Doesn’t like itOwned 0.83 years
10 months ago I've built a Raspberry Pi 5 mini NAS with 3 SSDs connected through RADXA Penta Hat. It runs OpenMediaVault, system is on the SDcard, other data are on the SSD ZFS pool. I have autosnapshots enabled, and I tune compression methods on specific datasets (lz4 for almost everything, zstd for file backups). We use it for storing (backups, media files), playing (PaperMC), and watching (Jellyfin). I can only complain about the lack of hardware decoding in Raspberry Pi 5. Jellyfin loads CPU much if I enable transcoding so it's always disabled. If I knew this, I'd consider a cheaper and faster, but less popular, RADXA machine. Storage is fast enough for me, rsync and Samba speeds are usually limited by my network. PaperMC also runs without a hitch, thanks for asking! As I didn't have high requirements for the machine, I also considered USB Bays at first but they wouldn't go well with ZFS.
Likes itOwned 0.67 yearsStill going
PI's are expensive. But they have a very stable and well developed software eco system and are really flexible. I still buy them. And a lot of them. Because with a Raspberry Pi 5 I'm able to make amazing wildlife camera sysetems that use thermal imaging and local AI to make an extremely effective solar powered wolf detector. I have a system in the field that's been running continuously since September 29 2025, over 8 months autonomously. It also records full frame thermal video in h264 24/7 and I can remotely retrieve images and video. That's a lot of functionality on a Pi 5. I've collected over 60 videos of wolves from just one site with a Raspberry Pi 5 in this manner. In Belgium... Which is not exactly the biggest hot spot for wolves. Videos here https://www.youtube.com/@hcftube1 and here https://www.youtube.com/@WildlifeSecurityInnovations
Doesn’t like it
There are a plethora of devices that outperform RPI in every single aspect. This has always been the case, AI proliferation or not. See the top comments in this thread for examples. Story: I spent roughly 140 USD and a 20 hours or so integrating RPI 5 2g into my vehicle ODB2/12v system. Programming the PID data from ODB2 into something readable on the RPI is something I never want to do again, and the power issues on RPI (and, lack of support) have made it largely not worth it. Further, I thought I would come up with some use case to use the GPIO pins, (IE a hat for "mechanical" GPS, G force, etc.) but the headaches with power, programming and even the touchscreens I procured have made it not worth it. I am now working on a basic NUC to replace that and it's a dream in comparison and cost next to nothing. GPIO access on RPI is negated as a "feature" by simply using USB on a NUC or similar mini pc for the same.
Doesn’t like it
For a standalone Pi power via USB is fine. As soon as these devices get embedded or you're running more than two in proximity the USB spaghetti gets pretty miserable. There are so many quirks with the Raspberry Pi that make it a pain to work with, from the lack of mainline Linux support on the Pi 5 to the awkward by default power arrangement to the fact that the architecture is a GPU with a CPU glued onto the side. The Raspberry foundation made SBCs much more ergonomic and kudos to them but working with them still feels like walking through a field of tiny rakes.
Likes it
I made 2 Raspberry Pi5 NAS's. one with 4x 6TB and one with 4x 12TB. Used mergerfs and snapraid, and a simple NFS share. Absolutely perfect for Proxmox backups, our pictures, media, etc, etc. No fuss, easy replacement of drives without needing to keep drives of the same size around. I'm good with ZFS, have been for years now managing storage for $COMPANY. And I still freaking love using zfs send/receive with proxmox ;-) But for most at home stuff: mergerfs and snapraid are just more logical.
Doesn’t like it
I was thinking about the RPi 6 yesterday whilst realising I couldn't set up my RPi Zero 2W anymore - the OS has become burdensome - tied strictly to an imager, that gives me an allergic reaction. Yes - they did all this for the uninitiated - but for Raspberry Pi OS Lite - bring back this experience: dd the image, write ssh into the boot drive, SSH in - change password, fully set up in almost zero fuss or effort. Then I actually couldn't set the thing up because of the mini HDMI connection - I have a mini to HDMI cable, but to use my portable screen with it I need mini HDMI to MINI HDMI. Don't get me started on micro HDMI - almost everyone of of those connectors I've bought slips off or breaks in the device. Every time I go to set up an RPi5 I end up having to order another one of those tiny connectors. Full HDMI for all new devices please. Even if the second display can't be connected. These days a 175 GBP N95 from a no-name Chinese OEM on Amazon, with 16 GB of RAM and a 500GB SATA SSD is way better value and performance - and importantly - zero fuss - standard setup.
Likes it
They have great software support and Google-ability, which also means LLMs understand how to work them. I use them in scenarios where I want both Linux and GPIO. Specifically, right now I have 4 Pi 5s running kiosk displays with RGB LEDs around the outside of each. The displays show a web page, requiring something powerful enough for modern Firefox, and the LEDs are synchronized to the state of the web pages. You could do this with a mini PC and a microcontroller, but it’s just way easier, and cheaper, to use a Pi.
Doesn’t like it
Still pretty unusable on Raspberry Pi 5, 16gb despite saying its built for it, from the E4B model total duration: 12m41.34930419s load duration: 549.504864ms prompt eval count: 25 token(s) prompt eval duration: 309.002014ms prompt eval rate: 80.91 tokens/s eval count: 2174 token(s) eval duration: 12m36.577002621s eval rate: 2.87 tokens/s Prompt: whats a great chicken breast recipe for dinner tonight?
Likes it
Got my RPi 5 16GB quite a while ago for around $160 and already thought that was expensive... It’s still powerful enough for almost everything I throw at it, honestly a bit overkill in most scenarios. With prices steadily going up, for me it's starting to feel more sensible to repurpose the RAM sticks I've collected from old PC builds / laptops and just throw together small amd64 boxes instead of buying more RPis.
Neutral
It comes preinstalled on new hardware, and has drivers. For folks who use odd-ball hardware, e.g., the new generation Wacom EMR stylus equipped Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 I'm writing this out on (really, using a stylus to write this out) it's pretty much the only option, which I wish was not the case. That said, I bought a pair of Raspberry Pi 5s a while back, and am hopeful that the Soulscircuit Pilet I backed on Kickstarter will work well w/ a Wacom One, and if it does so, I'll upgrade to a Movink 13 or something similar.
Doesn’t like it
It is acutely on point. The only reason people have to put in work again and again to fix distributions like Fedora for Raspberry Pi models is because the foundation pulls stunts like that revD. Right now, you can take Buildroot at git master, build an RPi image and have it randomly not work on one of two what looks like identical RPi 5 boards. That's bad, and there is no reason for it.
Doesn’t like it
100% with you on the IO. I've never even wanted two display output ports with any raspberry pi. You know what I do want though? An actual damn HDMI port! HDMI cables are everywhere, wherever I am I have unlimited options to connect an HDMI device to some kind of screen. But micro HDMI? The literal only thing in my life that uses it is the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5. There have been plenty of times where I've reached for a Pi 3b instead of a 4 or 5 just because I didn't have a micro HDMI cable. I do not understand what has gone through their head. How could anyone look at the use case for a Raspberry Pi and decide that two micro HDMI ports is a better choice than one HDMI port? I don't understand it. Like you, my experience with the Pi is that they mostly just sit there, headless, so the only reason I need display output is that it's useful during setup (because they don't have a proper serial console port). I can't set up a Pi 4 or 5 without going hunting for that micro HDMI cable I bought specifically for that purpose and never use for anything else. I can set up a Pi 3b anywhere, at any time.
Neutral
I had Home Assistant on an RPi 3 with 1 GB RAM and a USB thumb drive until sometime maybe 7-10 days ago when I switched to an RPi 5 with 8 GB RAM and the 256 GB SSD and NVME had sold by the RPi company. The 3 was and the 5 is plugged into an energy monitoring smart outlet. Here's a graph of power for that outlet [1] for the last 30 days. HA uses long term statistics for older than 10 days, which is why the 2/3 to the left shows much less variation. The switch from the 3 to the 5 is somewhere a little way into the right 1/3, where it is using shorter term data which has a much higher sample rate. It does look like the average power goes up with the 5, but not nearly as much as I would have thought. The left 2/3 which was definitely all RPi 3, averages 2.48 W. From Jan 17 to the present, which was definitely all RPi 5, it averages 2.64 W. If those reports of 2.8 W for an idle 4 are accurate I'm curious why my HA 5 is lower. I've got an unused energy monitoring smart plug of the same kind my HA Pi is on. I'll have to put the 4 on that and see how it compares. [1] https://imgur.com/a/qa7SD2O
Likes it
Oh no, it appears to have received the hug of death? I am interested in this, I have been using Raspberry Pis for various projects and home servers since the original - Currently one is hosting my navidrome music server, my password manager, and several other local network servers. I feel the upgrade each time, and then get used to it, as I suppose we tend to do. I still remember the upgrade from 1 to 2 being the most impactful to me personally though. (I think maybe because that's when game emulation became viable?)
Likes it
Thanks for the video. I just bought a RPI5 and was curious if this was a mistake, but after watching the whole 'I love PI' video, I am still okay with my choice. It is good to know that there are other boards with better multi-thread performance and AI capabilities. However, there are also a few things I disagree with in the test setup, such as rating only multithread performance and giving the best single-thread performance the lowest overall rating. In addition, concluding the AI tests without the extension board for the RPI5 seems a bit weird. So thank you for the video, but I think it depends on what you are trying to achieve and it is not a simple there you get more bang for your buck.
Doesn’t like it
> PCIe through very fragile ribbon cable We had a problem trying to bring up a couple of Pi 5, hoping they'd represent something reproducable we could deploy on multiple sites as an isolation stage for remote firmware programming. Everything looked great, until we brought one somewhere and untethered it from ethernet, and we started getting bizarre hangs. Turned out the wifi was close enough to the PCIe ribbon cable that bursts of wifi broadcasts were enough to disrupt the signal to the SSD, and essentially unmount it (taking root with it). Luckily we were able to find better shielded cables, but it's not something we were expecting to have to deal with.
Doesn’t like it
100% agree on the better video hardware. I found out this weekend the Raspberry Pi 5 removes the dedicated video encoder present on the Pi 4B. I was getting 2-3 fps in OBS, which makes it unusable for my application. Any mini PC would do much better with dedicated encode capabilities. To be fair, I haven't messed around with video encoding settings yet. I've seen claims the Pi 5 can do 1080p60 with 50% of the CPU. I could trade off quality for faster encoding, but with a mini PC I could get high quality encoding at real-time speeds. I'm feeling some buyer's remorse with the Pi 5 right now...
Recommends it
I now have a Raspberry PI + Pi-hole running on my home network so none of my family see ads any more and nobody has to install any software themselves. You can also add your children’s devices to specific groups with extra block lists, to keep them a bit safer in the internet. I got the Pi 5 to future-proof myself a bit and the entire kit cost about $160 and assembling and installing + configuring the network took 30 minutes. I honestly don’t know why I waited so long to do it. I highly advise. I know it’s not perfect, and you have to do some tweaks around DNS-over-HTTPS but quite honestly it feels like it was the best money I spent last year by far.
Doesn’t like it
> Raspberry Pis themselves are perfectly reliable given a stable power supply and good storage — steer clear of slow and flakey SD cards. At some point the problem stops being my fault and must be the ecosystem. I bought official power supplies, I bought top tier SD cards, I bought special hats to use NVME with RPi, they all sucked IMHO. Maybe I am "holding it wrong" but after buying every RPi from the original B to the 5th gen with the max ram I'm done. Also the foundation seems to have lost its way (especially through COVID) so I'm not really interested in support them anymore even if I found their hardware to be reliable.
Neutral
Very cool - amazing that you can fit something that small in your pocket and it can also power a full size monitor & keyboard. It sounds like the Hackberry Pi is a great fit for your use case. I hadn’t considered using the Bumble Berry like that, but now that you mention it, I might try it out like that next time I travel. It would be nice to have the beefier Pi 5 on Bumble Berry for the rare times that I need a GUI. I mostly use terminal on this device so it’s usually not a problem, but when I do have to use the full GUI I find the 3b+ annoyingly slow. I briefly tested the Bumble Berry battery with a Pi 500 and although I got an error message saying that the power supply is not capable of supplying 5A, it seemed to run just fine. The battery is rated to 3A, and streaming full screen video on a 4K screen seemed to draw only about 1A (measured by a usb-c pass-thru dongle). However, I did not push the Pi 5 to its limits and I haven’t used it for an extended amount of time so I can’t confidently say how well it would work. If you’re willing to pay the extra cash and want a smaller form factor it sounds like Hackberry is definitely the way to go.
Neutral
> ignore current warnings - I’m using a MacBook Pro charger + cable and still got the warning that I need a 5V/5A PSU. You need to be careful with this one. The USB spec goes up to 15W (3A) for its 5V PD profiles, and the standard way to get 25W would be to use the 9V profile. I assume the Pi 5 lacks the necessary hardware to convert a 9V input to 5V, and, instead, the Pi 5 and its official power supply support a custom, out-of-spec 25W (5A) mode. Using an Apple charger gets you the standard 15W mode, and, on 15W, the Pi can only offer 600mA for accessories, which may or may not be enough to power your NVMe. Using the 25W supply, it can offer 1.6A instead, which gives you plenty more headroom.
Doesn’t like it
I've used it with the Coral EdgeTPU and Hailo. These have worked very well. What hasn't worked the greatest is the video transcoding, but that's mostly my fault. The first mistake was thinking that the Raspberri Pi would be suitable for this. The Raspberry Pi 5 seems like a good choice, but unfortunately, it lacks video encoding. The Raspberry Pi 4 has both encoding and decoding, but no PCIe interface for the EdgeTPU and Hailo. It is possible to use the USB EdgeTPU, but anything more than a few camera streams will not go well with the Raspberry Pi. My results with an Intel N100 have been much better, but I also made another mistake. I had issues where some videos were not recorded, and I think this has to do with me not using small video sizes for monitoring vs. larger ones for recording. Everything was large, and that's probably why the N100 couldn't keep up with 5 cameras. I can't confirm it because that system's disk died and it hasn't yet been restored. I'm interested to try Frigate with OpenVINO on the Intel Arc GPU. I have a Minisform MS-01 that should be able to transcode more camera streams. It will be interesting to see how the stronger iGPU fares vs. the Coral EdgeTPU.
Likes it
I just used the Raspberry-PI V to bring up the PCIe interface on a Lattice Certus-Pro NX "Versa" board, it's very convenient. What's cool is that the Raspberry-PI V is just fast enough to run modern desktop software, including (ack!) Microsoft Teams. I was able to give a live demo of my FPGA design by sharing the desktop during a conference call. My only complaint is, of course, lack of SoC documentation from Broadcom. Say what you will about Intel, but they do provide full chip documentation if you go through their NDA process. With it, I made a very nice FPGA PCIe environment on Xeon Ivy Bridge: it let me save all of the PCI config registers, then reconfigure the FPGA, then reprogram them and have the chip show up on the bus without having to reboot the server or re-enumerate. The trick is to temporarily set the root complex bit to disable PCIe error detection during the reconfiguration process. (Was using Altera Stratix-IIgx at the time). There is possibly another way to this, but haven't tried it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32334870/how-to-do-a-tru... But even aside from that, with the documentation you have access to a lot of error reporting which is extremely useful during PCIe bring-up.
Likes itStill going
Having followed rpi from the start, I suspect the choice of "200" is a marketing ploy to make the potential customers compare it to a refurb laptop. The company has a good product with a massive peripheral market, and you can open it up and add bells and whistles (literally). And a mechanical keyboard! I'd get one in an instant except my pi 5 with a Bluetooth keyboard is still going strong.