What I learned from using a Raspberry Pi 5 as my main computer for two weeks

I bought an 8GB Raspberry Pi 5 as soon as they went up for preorder, just like I have bought every full-size Pi model since the Pi 3 Model B launched back in 2016, including the Pi 3B+, with its better Wi-Fi and more efficient chip, and the Pi 4, with its substantial performance and RAM boost.

The difference is that I didn't really have anything in mind for the Pi 5 when I bought it. But years of Pi shortages made me worried about its scarcity, and I figured I'd buy first and ask questions later rather than want it later and be totally unable to get one. In the end, it will probably knock each of my other Pis down a level in my tech setup: the Pi 5 becomes the retro emulation box, the Pi 4 becomes the multi-use always-on light-duty server (currently running a combo of HomeBridge, WireGuard, and a dynamic DNS IP address updater), the Pi 3B+ joins the Pi 3B as either "test hardware for small one-off projects" or "the retro emulation box I lent to a friend which may or may not have been ruined when their basement flooded."

Before I did that, though, I wanted to take another crack at trying to use a Pi as an everyday general-purpose desktop computer. The Raspberry Pi's operating system has always included many of the tools you'd need to take a crack at this, including a lightweight desktop environment and a couple of web browser options, and the Pi 4-based Pi 400 variant has always been pitched specifically as a general-purpose computer.

But even with 4GB or 8GB of RAM, the truth is that the Pi 4 was still using the equivalent of a budget smartphone processor. It's plenty of power for the kinds of lightweight single-purpose hobby projects that the Pi was always meant for, but it's not nearly enough to make the kind of browser-heavy office work that I do feel responsive or fluid. It felt close, sometimes. But you always spent a lot more time waiting on things than you would on an entry-level Mac or PC desktop.

But maybe the Pi 5 will be better! Looking at the spec sheet, things seem promising: "between two and three times" the CPU and GPU processing power of the Raspberry Pi 4, faster interfaces for storage including the option for an internal PCIe SSD, and support for a pair of 4K displays running at 60 Hz over the board's micro HDMI ports. Considered as a list of high-level technical capabilities, it's at least in the same neighborhood as a Mac mini, though Apple's M2 still has a lot more performance to spare.

My journey started out disappointing, which led me to reset my expectations, and after some adjusting, I eventually got around to being pleasantly surprised. Here's what I discovered.

My hardware

The Pi 5 still ships without any kind of cooler on the SoC, and you can use it that way if you want; for short bursts of activity, it won't get hot enough quickly enough to cause big problems. But this is the generation where a small fan and heatsink has gone from "necessary if you want to overclock a bit" to "necessary to get sustained peak performance at stock speeds." There's a real fan header now and everything. To maximize my odds of conducting a successful experiment, active cooling was a must.

I bought the official Raspberry Pi 5 case and power supply from my local Micro Center, noting that the case came with its own cooler. I had assumed that this would be the same thing as the Raspberry Pi Active Cooler, a fairly substantial bit of aluminum with a fan mounted directly on top and coverage for most of the important chips on the top of the board. Unfortunately, the case's built-in cooler was less robust-looking—one of those cheap stick-on heatsinks for the main SoC, plus a fan mounted above it integrated into the lid of the case rather than attached to the heatsink directly.