Answering some questions about the Raspberry Pi 5

It's less than 12 hours since the Pi 5 launch, and already there's a few hundred questions whizzing about—I thought I'd answer some of the things I see people asking most frequently, like:

Does the new Case have room for the Active Cooler, or other Pi HATs?

Raspberry Pi 5 case with active cooler

Yes, indeed it does! You can pop out the fan bracket in the new Case, and fit many normal-size Pi HATs. This is useful also if you want to stack cases—assuming the HAT has mounting points, you could put some spacers in and stack another Pi or Pi + Case on top!

Have you tested [insert PCIe device here] yet?

Yes, check out my earlier post testing various PCIe devices on the Pi 5.

Will there be an official M.2 NVMe SSD HAT?

It looks like the answer is yes—sometime in early 2024, if Raspberry Pi's official blog post is any indication:

From early 2024, we will be offering a pair of mechanical adapter boards which convert between this connector and a subset of the M.2 standard, allowing users to attach NVMe SSDs and other M.2-format accessories. The first, which conforms to the standard HAT form factor, is intended for mounting larger devices. The second, which shares the L-shaped form factor of the new PoE+ HAT, supports mounting 2230- and 2242-format devices inside the Raspberry Pi 5 case.

Have you compared the Pi 5 to Orange Pi 5?

Yes, also the Rock 5 B—see the comparisons in the performance section of my Pi 5 video. It is about as fast for PHP and media encoding, but the RK3588 and RK3588s (with their four additional Arm A55 cores) smoke the Pi in many compute-heavy benchmarks.

Can you explain more of the PCIe, USB, and peripheral architecture?

Yes, for starters, check out my Pi 5 issue on my sbc-reviews project on GitHub, there is active discussion there with all the gory details.

The RP1 chip uses four PCIe Gen 2 lanes off the BCM2712, and the external PCIe FPC connector exposes an additional Gen 2 lane off the BCM2712. The user has control over that lane and can uprate it to Gen 3 (10 GT/sec) if they so choose.

The USB-C port used for Power Delivery also supports USB OTG at USB 2.0 speeds (though I haven't had time to test it out yet—it should work similar to the Pi 4, though power delivery through that port can be interesting.

Does the USB-C port negotiate PD at 9V or 12V?

No, only 5V, and I've tested 5V at 5A (using the official Pi USB-C PD PSU), and 5V at 3A (using the official Pi USB-C 3A PSU).

Radxa USB-C PD 30W and Pi 5 Power adapter PSU

I also tested the Radxa USB-C PD 30W power adapter, which says it will output 5V at 5A, but the Pi only negotiates 3A with it right now. I've been in contact with Pi engineers and it seems like they have one on the way to test to see why it's not negotiating more.

I should also note the official adapter lists 12V at 2.25A output as an option, so maybe some future Pi could take that and run with it, for increased compatibility with more USB-C PD adapters (5V at 5A is a rarely seen, though it's an option in the spec).

Kill-A-Watt Pi 5 idle power consumption

Do you have any numbers for performance?

Yes, check out the sbc-reviews Pi 5 issue for specific numbers, and also see the links in that issue to a top500 HPL benchmark result, Geekbench 6 results, and more.

Do you have any numbers on energy efficiency?

Yes, in fact—check out the sbc-reviews Pi 5 issue for specific numbers, but I should add a few caveats:

  1. I was testing mainly with the Pi 5V/5A PSU, Pi 5V/3A PSU, and Radxa 30W PSU. With each, idle power consumption as measured at the wall differed by as much as 1W. My 1.8W idle result came from the official 5A PSU and a Kill-A-Watt. With the Radxa PSU I was seeing as much as 3W idle.
  2. I don't currently have a high quality inline USB-C PD-aware analyzer, but my little cheap chinesium one reported 2-3W idle power use (even while the Kill-A-Watt reported 1.8-2W).
  3. At all power levels, the Pi 5 can perform more using less energy than a Pi 4 at anything besides pure idle.
  4. I have only tested overclocking in a very rudimentary manner, bumping my Pi to 2.6 and 2.8 GHz. Both worked, but 2.8 GHz got a little unstable.
  5. Users who care more about idle power consumption, and who don't need to run performance-heavy workloads may be better served with a Pi 4, Pi 3, or Pi Zero 2W instead. Heck, if you can run it on a Pico or Arduino, you'll save even more mW :)

Is there any hardware video encoding support?

No. Raspberry Pi recommends software encoding, and in my testing, I could get decent enough data rates for H.264 in HD resolutions, but 4K bogged down a bit.

The libcamera encoder app includes a preset with defaults Pi engineers have chosen for their efficiency on the BCM2712; it should encode 1080p60 using about 25% CPU load.

4K60 HEVC (H.265) decoding is hardware-accelerated, though.

I will be updating this post throughout the day as more questions roll in.

Further reading

raspberry pi
pi 5
linux
usb-c
pcie

Comments

Will the Pi5 and Pi4 share accessories, like cases, etc?

Looking forward to more in-depth power consumption testing in the future!

I have Rev 1.2 8GB Pi 4Bs in my cluster, and I’ve managed to get them down to ~1.95W idle over POE (using the older hat) without dropping down to 100Mbps or limiting stock CPU performance. I’m especially curious as to how close the new 5 with the new hat will get to those idle and low load numbers.

5V at 5A is really rare. you need proper cable. 12V would be much more reasonable

Any potential for a large vertical or horizontal cooler to fit in the open case (like GeeekPi)? And then some overclocking?

What is the Vih for the GPIO pins? Can I run open drain 1.8 or even 1.2V I2C devices without a level shifter (like the Pico can)? Is there quad SPI or any new IO buses? How fast is the bit banging? Any Pico peripherals on the RP1 die?

Two questions.

I have seen mentioned somewhere that the Southbridge has a M3 core built in to deal with the GPIO, will that be user-programmable?

It's really something that it's happening more and more often those days, TI, Renesas and co offer a lot of chips that have Application Cores and MCU cores running RTOS and stuff and that could be something pretty different against RK3588 boards.

In the github page, you have power consumption figures, did you notice downclocking going on? My impression really is that since they have used a considerably older node(16nm) vs the newer one from the RK3588 is that the VF(voltage-frequency) curve is going to be worse, as it even clocks higher too.

This might be why GB6 multi-cores results aren't that great.

Any change of getting AV out of the PI5 via GPIO since theres no analog 3.5mm anymore?

There is a pad for analog video output still, and for audio, you can get it through GPIO with a DAC HAT, or your own design (otherwise USB audio is probably the simplest/cheapest way to get decent quality).

Jeff, what are the dimensions of the case fan? Checking to see if I have an identically-sized Noctua banging around in the junk bin.

Will the raspberry pi 5 fit in the geekpi cluster case so that we can stack them like the pi4?

You do a great job of putting the Pi 5's performance into context in your video, Jeff, even if those performance charts do whip by a bit sharpish.

What I'd love to hear about is how you heard about the upcoming launch, how long ago you heard etc. Can we look forward to a video about an inside view on that topic from you?

Yes...hopefully :)

I have footage from an interview in May, when I first got to see the early prototypes (that was an ulterior motive for my visit to the UK ;) — I talked about a lot of the engineering challenges and decisions building the Pi 5. I hope to get that into video form sometime this year, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Will it be possible to send DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD and/or Atmos audio streams (pass thru, not real-time encoding) over the HDMI?

Hey Jeff, although the ethernet has been moved. Do you know if there is any difference in alignment/spacing for the USB 3.0 ports. I want to know if my Pi Rack Pro will still work 😅

In the video you mentioned that we can plug in 2 portable hard drives and copy files between them. Have you tested how many portable hard drives can Pi 5 power up concurrently?

No, only tested two so far. <2A over USB with the 5A power supply is not a whole lot, even some high power SSDs could eat that up if you plug in two. Better safe than sorry, so I recommend a powered hub if you use more than 1 even (2 is stretching it a little).

With this upgrade - curious...can this be used for "Low Power" crypto mining?

Any ETA on the 16GB version?
Are we sure there will be one?

My impression is that some effort was made to provide more open source drivers with the Pi 5. Is that impression correct? I'd love to see a comparison of the list of closed source bits and blobs from the Pi 4 and the Pi 5.

Yes, some things will be open source at launch this time around, though still not quite everything. Raspberry Pi is definitely listening to community feedback and working with Broadcom to try to keep the closed blobs as minimal as possible. We should keep pushing to make it as open as possible!

Hi Jeff, Nice video on the Pi5. You coverd everything but the kitchensink.
But after watching the review, i could not get my head arround what shirt you are wearing, a Dutch nationale soccer shirt!
Geerling is a Dutch name, Dutch roots perhaps?

How much current leaks when the RPi 5 is connected to wall adapter? Is the DA9091 good for use with a battery power source.. in that when the RPi 5 shutsdown and is scheduled to wake later the leakage current is minimal (less than 1mA)? This was my biggest complaint about using a RPi Zero with a battery, it used to much current when shutdown.

Hi Jeff, do you have any more information about the inner workings of the RP1 "south bridge"?

Will it finally support multichannel audio over I²S/TDM?
Will the Raspberry Pi Foundation release a datasheet fot the RP1?

Does the RP1 have it's own internal processor?
If yes, could it be user programmable? The RP1 would certainly be a MCU with a helluva lot of connectivity...
If not, could the IP used in the RP1 be reused in a successor to the RP2040?

Another use case, if the RP1 would be publicly available some day, would be a PCIe extension card for a normal PC that offers lots of connectivity (USB, MIPI, Ethernet) and even GPIO, which would be pretty awesome for a PCIe card...

Best Regards,

Bastian

I don't have too much more info, but I will say the whole "RP1 as a PCIe card for a normal PC" was a question I also posed to the Pi engineers.

Do we know if it will be possible to use the new PoE+ hat together with another hat, e.g. the coming M2 hat?

how would a pi 5 gpu stack up against a pi 400 gpu clocked at 900mhz

Which SD card do you recommend for RPi5 for best performance? :)

I personally run SanDisk Extreme cards (A1) and have for the past couple years. Samsung PRO are pretty good too.

Hello! Way back you did some benchmarking of SD cards to find out which one is the most suitable. Do you plan on running similar test in the future of Raspberry Pi 5 or have any recommendation which one to get now? Thanks!

Do you know if the different hats can be stacked on top of the active cooler, e.g. have the active cooler with the PoE hat and the NVMe M.2 SSD hat (not released yet) stacked?

Is the Pi5 able to connect to a WPA3 wifi network ? I can't get that to work on Pi4, which can be excused as it's an older device, but I really hope Pi5 will fix that...

I Wonder there will be a Compute module 5 I really want hope its coming Soon

I just bought an active cooler today and was surprised/disappointed to find that the temperature of the Pi was actually 2 or 3 degrees higher than with the fan and heat sink that come with the standard red and white RasPi 5 case. I wasn't doing anything to stress it, so I don't know if the results might be different under load (for example the fan might spin faster in the active cooler?).

Hey!
Thanks for testing it with the active cooler and the case! Just got mine in and wanted to make sure it would fit before trying myself. I need it since I plan on folding till the end of the month with it.

Hey Jeff! Something that has been bugging my mind, has the PCIe Expansion board come out yet? I mean, i've been trying to get a hold on one of those and can't seem to find it anywhere. I read your note stating that RPi Foundation was releasing some sort of HAT's / boards for NVMe early 2024. Is that expansion board included?
Great job and thanks for all your time and info!!

Is it possible to change the fan speed/temperature curve on the Pi 5?

Any news on Radxa PSU compatibility? I made a mistake of not ordering PSU with Pi5 straight away, now I have Pi but no PSU and it's out of stock everywhere :(

I have been using my Radxa 30W PSU just fine, but it only seems to support 3A so the USB power is slightly limited.

Getting "Undervoltage detected!" on 3A USB-C PSU with an external SSD, so will be laying in the drawer until I get a 5A one unfortunately :(

Hi Jeff I saw your comments on using the Active cooler instead of the stock fan and heat sinks in the Pi 5 Case.
I think that removing the stock shroud would be sub optimal with the active cooler based on my observations on the case design.
Am I aloud to post links to printabls on here ? "If not go and do a search there for Active Cooler Fan Shroud". It replaces the existing fan shroud with one that reflects the location of the fan on the active cooler. I am hoping it will improve cooling ....just ot my Pi 5yesterday

dear, otg_mode=1 does not seem to activate the XHCI USB2 controller on my Pi 5 (8GB) when added into config.txt [All]-section though this works on my Pi4s?

I can’t get ExpressVPN working on the Pi5, and their website does not include the Pi5 in with its compatibility list.

Possible typo in the answer to “Does the USB-C port provide PD at 9V or 12V?”

No, only 5V, and I've tested 5V at 5A (using the official Pi USB-C PD PSU), and 5V at 5A (using the official Pi USB-C 3A PSU).

If you were able to get 5A from the 3A PSU that would definitely be newsworthy :)