The Raspi 5 is not just suitable for craft projects. c’t 3003 editor Keno used the latest Raspberry Pi 5 in everyday life for a week and not only took part in team calls, but also emulated PS2 and Wii games. You can find out how this works and what else was possible with Ubuntu in the video.
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Transcript of the video
(Note: This transcript is intended for people who cannot or do not want to watch the video above. The text does not reflect all of the information in the image track.)
Look here, my Raspi 5, which costs 68 euros, runs Playstation 2, Wii and GameCube games, as well as a complete Ubuntu Linux, really, with animations and everything! AND: I CAN NOW TURN IT ON AT THE PRESS OF A BUTTON BECAUSE FOR THE FIRST TIME THERE IS A POWER BUTTON! I’M GOING NUTS!
In this video I take a closer look at how it performs in practice, whether the thing is suitable as a workstation computer or as a games console and also: What’s still annoying at the moment? I used the thing every day for a week.
Dear hackers, dear internet surfers, welcome here to…
Yes, we had already made a video for the release of the Raspberry Pi 5, and I promised you that we would dig deeper into the Raspi 5. I definitely did that and not only worked on the Raspi 5 as the main computer for a whole week, but also played it nicely. Raspis have been considered a pretty practical emulation game console for years.
I’ll start with that: There’s recently been an official Raspi 5 version of my favorite game emulation Linux distribution Batocera (We had already made a video about this). The Raspi 5 Bato is beta, so it will definitely take a few weeks or months until everything is properly optimized. By the way, there is no Raspi 5 version from the also very popular emulation distributor RetroPie, but that should be coming soon.
The Batocera beta works absolutely problem-free at first: If you have copied the installation image to a microSD or USB storage device using the Raspberry Pi Imager, the Raspi boots up in a matter of seconds, i.e. really quickly. And of course all 8- and 16-bit systems work without any problems, which was already the case with Raspi 4. Things get interesting from the 3D era, i.e. Nintendo 64, Sega Dreamcast, Playstation 2, Gamecube. The Raspi 4 could play Dreamcast quite well and many Nintendo 64 games worked smoothly, but not all of them. That’s different with the Raspi 5, where even N64 problem candidates like Goldeneye run absolutely smoothly. And Dreamcast too, that’s what the Raspi does on the left buttock, look here, Crazy Taxi with 60fps and the Raspi 5 like this: Yawn.
What definitely didn’t work on the Raspi 4: Playstation 2. But it does on the Raspi 5, at least to some extent. However, it’s not really playable yet, but as I said, the Batocera beta isn’t optimized yet either. This is what GTA San Andreas currently looks like on the Raspi 5. Things are working better with the Nintendo GameCube, so I would say that many titles are definitely playable. By the way, we’ve hidden the image here because Nintendo always likes to make a big splash when emulation is shown here on YouTube – hmm, yes. And just before recording this video, I noticed: Even the Nintendo Wii can be emulated to some extent. So: Emulation is definitely better than with Raspi 4. And there’s still a lot to come.
Oh yes, which is probably of interest to many of you: The Raspberry Pi Foundation recommends a fan for the Raspi 5, how does that work in practice? To be honest, I was a bit afraid of that, but in the end I was very pleasantly surprised: Even though I always had the Raspi right next to my keyboard, I didn’t hear the fan once (except in Ubuntu, but more on that later). ). So I didn’t hear it when emulating games either. Every now and then I took off the housing cover to see if it was turning at all. Yes, it mostly rotated, but just inaudibly. So I would definitely recommend buying the fan for around 6 euros. But you don’t HAVE to do that, the Raspi 5 runs stably even without it and you don’t have to worry about burning your chip: because if the Raspi SoC gets 80 degrees warm under high load, it simply slows down. This so-called throttling ensures that you don’t break the Raspi even without a fan – but of course, that costs performance. So if you don’t want your computer to slow down, then it’s better to use the fan. Specifically, the fan delivered up to 11 percent more performance in our measurements in the Geekbench benchmark.
Yes, and how is the Raspi 5 as an everyday computer? I have to say that I first used the official standard operating system Raspberry Pi OS, which was previously called Raspbian. Yes, and ok, you can use it for everyday stuff, but that was already the case with the Raspi 4. So of course, websites build much faster with the 5 Raspi and the overall speed is significantly higher. But if we’re honest: Raspberry Pi OS is stable and does what it’s supposed to do, but it’s not particularly nice, let alone comfortable. For example, the snap-in function that I constantly use, which allows you to automatically snap windows to half or a quarter of the screen, is missing. Ok, I can live with that, but what really annoyed me: the ugly text display of my favorite email program Thunderbird and the absolutely confusing “Appstore”, i.e. the graphical interface for installing programs. No, that’s no longer up to date. And: There are also a number of programs missing from the package sources, so I couldn’t install many of them at all.
That’s why I installed Ubuntu, which is also available natively for the Raspberry Pi, you can install it directly with the Raspberry Pi Imager, you don’t even have to download it manually. And WOW, what a difference! This is truly the real Ubuntu Gnome desktop environment, so without any compromises. Yes, that’s what a modern desktop looks like, everything moves in such a wobbly way. And snapping windows also works here, yes, great. In addition: The “application center” is much clearer than with Raspberry Pi OS and also has a lot more software to choose from. However, you have to keep in mind that we are using ARM architecture here, not x64 – which means that the software offering on “normal” PCs is of course even better. But what you need in everyday life can also be found here.
Unfortunately, the Raspi 5 Ubuntu currently has a big bug: When you use the fan, it always rotates at full speed in Ubuntu, which is really loud (we measured 1.5 sones at c’t). With these commands you can switch the fan back to the inaudible level 1:
sudo bash
cat > /sys/class/thermal/cooling_device0/cur_state
2
<CTRL-D>
Yes, in general I really enjoyed using the Raspi 5 with Ubuntu as an everyday machine. Everything went really well, for example any sound recordings, my USB audio interface was recognized without any problems, video conferences with teams were also great, the only thing, and of course that’s stupid as a YouTuber: YouTube stutters from 1080p onwards, especially with videos with 60 images per second, with the more common 30 fps standard it’s just about fine, I would say. A few frames are also dropped here, which you can see if you right-click on the strange YouTube function “Statistics for those interested”. Unfortunately, it only works properly with 720p. That’s a shame and it’s because the Raspi has very few built-in hardware video decoders. For example, it doesn’t have VP9, which is the codec that YouTube primarily uses. Neither do H.264 and WebM. Strictly speaking, there is only one hardware video decoder and that is H.265. This is a popular codec for 4K videos, which means if you want to use the Raspi as a living room player with Kodi or something, then you shouldn’t have any problems. And if the Raspi 5 doesn’t do anything other than play videos, then the pure CPU performance is enough to play videos smoothly with non-hardware-supported codecs. But in the browser, in YouTube, yes, there are a lot of other things to do and that’s where the Raspi reaches its limits. I couldn’t get YouTube to run completely smoothly in 1080p60, not even with workarounds like the embedded YouTube page or playing in VLC. But as I said: As a pure media player, i.e. without running a desktop with a browser and such, all common video formats work smoothly.
Oh, another important thing: If you want to do a lot on the desktop, then don’t use a microSD as your system disk. Take a look here, these are my measured values with Raspberry Pi OS on microSD: 88 MB/s read, 32 MB/s write. And this is a USB SSD: 360 read, 252 write. That’s a HUGE difference. And yes, the Raspi 5 can also boot from USB storage devices if desired. Of course, an NVMe SSD built into the housing is even more elegant. The Raspi 5 theoretically supports this, but you still need an adapter board, which we haven’t been able to test yet.
My conclusion
So the Raspi 5 is a super fun computer, especially when you consider its tiny size and the power consumption of only 3 watts when idle and 9 watts at full load. The big question that you keep asking in the comments: Why should you buy a Raspi 5 and not, for example, a used thin client? Finally, in addition to the board price of 68 euros for the Raspi 5 with 4 GB of RAM, there is definitely an additional 13 euros for the rather special power supply, and for most of them there is probably also a housing, fan, microHDMI cable and system data carrier. You’ll quickly be over 100 euros, but for that price you get a much more powerful thin client. Yes, and what’s more: As I’m recording this, there isn’t a single Raspi 5 available in the entire German-speaking world.
However, there are a few things that speak in favor of the Raspi: For example, it has GPIO pins and therefore the ability to get in touch with your hardware tinkering, something that no normal PC offers. And: Because the community is so huge, there are many software projects for Raspis that are tailored precisely to the hardware, such as RetroPie for game emulation. Then you know exactly that it runs optimally on your hardware and you don’t have to experiment. But for normal desktop applications, you are definitely better off with a mini PC or a thin client. Feel free to write in the comments what you think is the best Raspi alternative and then we might make a video about it. And of course feel free to subscribe, thank you! Bye!
c’t 3003 is c’t’s YouTube channel. The videos on c’t 3003 are independent content and independent of the articles in c’t magazine. The editors Jan-Keno Janssen and Lukas Rumpler as well as the video producers Şahin Erengil and Pascal Schewe publish a video every week.
(jkj)