this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 59 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (5 children)

Pi 5 sucks massive balls.

They now require a special power supply for it to work else it just crashes under load. Their use of USB C is insanely confusing because it doesn't work with any normal USB C psu.

This power supply costs 15 bucks which conveniently isn't included in the price. Also a heat sink that costs 6 bucks.

Also they stuck with micro hdmi which sucks. (even more special accessories needed)

The required accessories almost cost as much as just an old pi.

I hope the community jumps over to Rockchip based boards soon. Pi has taken the communities open source efforts and spit in their face.

Risc5 is also interesting but that seems to be a far bigger task since it need recompilation of a lot of existing stuff

[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Wow, at the start of this comment i thought you were just being overly negative, but one by one, each point crushed me a little more. it's so sad what's become of this once great little product. The special power supply is a complete and total deal breaker for so many reasons. that eliminated so many use cases for me. And the lack of a standard hdmi port (or even usb c video output) is just the shtty cherry on top.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Yeah power seems like such a small thing but for an SBC it's a pretty big deal.

The power usage is also pretty crushing for it the Pi's usage in hobby Robotics. Finally we have some computing power but now it's unusable because how are you going to get 5V5A from a powerbank? We could power the Pi4 from a decent USB C supporting powerbank, But this is no longer the case for the Pi5.

If they supported "normal" USB PD then at least a powerbank with quick-charge support (9v3a) would work and give you the same total 25W wattage. And the PD USB chargers would have been way cheaper because 9v3A get mass produced. This 5V5A is some Apple tier of "propriatary" standard and I really wonder why they did it.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Even the recommended 5V3A supply for the Pi4 is non-standard and requires you to either buy the official power brick or wade through a sea of sketchy Chinese knockoffs that may or may not deliver their rated power. I don't understand why they haven't explored alternative connectors or slapped a voltage regulator on the board in order to use a 12V supply. 5V5A USB is just ridiculous. USB only makes sense when you're using universal requirements, but this might as well be a barrel connector as you can't use any normal USB charger with it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

But it does support usb pd, starting with pi 5, you can use any usb pd power source, so long as it can provide the needed wattage

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I refuse to admit 5v5a is USB PD. This is like USB3.1gen2by4 Rev 9001

USB PD was meant for

15w = 5v3a

30w = 9v3a

45w =15v3a

60-100w = 20v3-5a

Phones that wanted to do it different made up their own name with blackjack and WOOX charging. I don't need the Pi foundation single handedly screwing this up.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Is there a RasPi alternative that's competitive in price and has PCI-e support? It's been a dream project of mine for quite some time to pair an ultra low power SoC to a GPU in order to make a crazy overpowered Folding@Home or BOINC cluster.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I could say the Orange Pi 5, however Orange Pi's ports currently tend to only work with specific accessories which they already wrote drivers for themselves. It's not like they're blocking other devices, but just like how RPI still needs a lot of work to support GPU's with drivers, Orange Pi probably needs even more.

The integrated GPU is pretty good though.

Most alternatives to RPI use a Rockchip such as the RK3566 for mid range and RK3588 for high end stuff.

There's also the new cheap 15 bucks LuckFox Pico with Rockchip RV1106 with a small NPU for AI projects, kind of a Pi Pico alternative.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'd recommend Orange Pi 5 plus. It's much more expandable than OP 5.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Id recommend avoiding Orange anything until they can unfuck their flashing software.

Fucking windows-only chinese shitwear. Fuck Orange Pi. I'll never buy another one.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

yep. Banana pi also use Windows-only Flashing Software. but that depends on the chip used, if I am not mistaken.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago

That is only for Android no?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Thank you for your recommendation. I've looked at some of those SoCs and they're impressive but none of them do what I'm looking for. I want to make a graveyard for my old GPUs, but without the power overhead I have right now with them configured as essentially a mining rig that's folding proteins instead of guessing the hash. I understand that the potential power saved by using ARM or RISC over x86/64 is a few dozen watts at best and chosing an SoC over a desktop platform hamstrings any opportunity for scaling, but it's been a dream project of mine for quite some time. It doesn't have to be practical.

Whenever I am doing different projects I go with RasPi alternatives. I agree they're cheaper and superior.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Low end Intel like Gracemount N200 are lower power and higher performance than Raspberry Pi.

Even an old JasperLake is like 24 watts max to Pi5's 27 watts.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

What non standard thing are they doing with the power supply? The PSU looks like a regular usb c PD supply to me (even supports 12v, nice!)

Edit: wtf! 5v@5a yeah thats non standard. What were they thinking?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

I'm assuming it's like the Nintendo switch USBC lead which technically is standard but doesn't really work to charge anything else. but at least you can use normal USBC leads to charge the switch so it's not too bad.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Well, I don't expect more from ot rather than low-power home server.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

the community's* open-source efforts