The Raspberry Pi started life as a cheap computer to get young people coding, and it turned into the go-to brain for home servers, retro game machines, robots, weather stations and thousands of weekend projects. The Raspberry Pi 5 is the fastest full-size model the company has made, and it is still the easiest way to start building your own tech.
Here is what it is, what you can do with it, which version to buy and what else you need to get it running.
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What it is
The Raspberry Pi 5 is a single-board computer: a complete computer on one circuit board roughly the size of a credit card. It is made by Raspberry Pi Ltd, the British company behind every Pi, and the board itself is marked as made in the United Kingdom.
At its heart is a Broadcom BCM2712 chip with four Arm Cortex-A76 cores running at 2.4 gigahertz, which Raspberry Pi says delivers two to three times the central processing unit (CPU) performance of the Raspberry Pi 4, according to its product brief. It adds a VideoCore VII graphics processor, two micro High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) ports that can drive two 4K displays at 60 frames per second, dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, Gigabit Ethernet, two Universal Serial Bus (USB) 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports and a microSD card slot for the operating system.
It is also the first full-size Pi built around silicon designed in house. The RP1 input and output controller handles most of the board's connections and more than doubles total USB bandwidth. Other firsts for the line include a single-lane Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) 2.0 connector for fast add-ons such as a solid-state drive (SSD), a built-in real-time clock and, at last, a power button.
Where it came from
The first Raspberry Pi launched in 2012 with a simple idea from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the British educational charity behind it: make a computer cheap enough that any young person could own one and learn to program. It went on to sell in the tens of millions, to students, hobbyists and companies building it into their own products. The Raspberry Pi 5 followed in late 2023 as the biggest jump in the line's history, and versions with more memory have joined since.
One detail matters if you are planning a long-term build: Raspberry Pi says the Pi 5 will remain in production until at least January 2036, so replacement boards and compatible accessories will be around for years.
What you can build with it
- A home server. Run file sharing, network-wide ad blocking, a media library or a smart home hub. Add an SSD through an M.2 add-on board and it becomes a quiet, low-power network-attached storage (NAS) box.
- A retro game console. Free emulation software turns it into a living room machine for classic games you own, with a wired or Bluetooth controller.
- A desktop computer. Plug in two monitors, a keyboard and a mouse, and Raspberry Pi OS, the free official operating system, handles browsing, writing and coding. Our mechanical keyboards guide will help you pick a good keyboard for it.
- A learning tool. The 40-pin general-purpose input and output (GPIO) header connects sensors, lights, motors and add-on boards called HATs, short for Hardware Attached on Top, which makes it ideal for learning Python and electronics.
- A music or video player. Its hardware video decoding and a wide range of audio add-ons make it a popular base for streaming boxes and networked speakers.
Which version to buy
Every Raspberry Pi 5 has the same processor and connections. The difference is memory, which comes in several sizes up to 16 gigabytes (GB).
- 4GB. Enough for most projects, from home servers to retro gaming and learning to code.
- 8GB. The sweet spot if you want to use it as a desktop or run several services at once. The one most people should buy.
- 16GB. For heavy multitasking, big software builds and power users who want the most headroom.
- Lower-memory boards. Raspberry Pi also sells smaller memory versions, which suit single-purpose builds like sensors and simple controllers.
What else you need
The bare board will not boot on its own. You need a microSD card loaded with Raspberry Pi OS, which the free Raspberry Pi Imager tool writes for you, a power supply and some way to keep the chip cool.
- Power. Raspberry Pi recommends a high-quality 5-volt, 5-amp USB-C supply such as its own 27-watt USB-C Power Supply. The Pi 5 can misbehave on underpowered chargers, and older Pi 4 supplies may not be enough.
- Cooling. Like most general-purpose computers, the Pi 5 performs best with active cooling. The official Active Cooler clips onto the board, or the official case has a fan built in.
- A case. The Pi 5 does not fit Pi 4 cases, so buy one made for it.
A starter kit bundles the board, power supply, cooling, case and a preloaded card, which is the easiest route for a first build. If you like small, hackable hardware, our Teenage Engineering guide is a good next read, and our handheld consoles guide is worth checking before you build a retro machine. For gift ideas around a Pi, see our tech gifts guide.
Where to buy
Raspberry Pi sells through a network of approved resellers, listed by country on its official Raspberry Pi 5 page, and the board, official power supply and full kits are widely available. Stock of the board alone can come and go, so a kit is often the quickest way to get one.
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