Raspberry Pi 5 Desktop Replacement?

I went a bit overboard during Covid lockdown and built myself this monster desktop with 128GB of RAM and dual RTX 3090s. Yeah, I know - totally ridiculous. At the time it seemed like a great idea (I mean, what else was I going to spend money on?), but lately I’ve been watching my power bill creep up and thinking, “Do I really need all this horsepower just to browse Reddit and write some code?”

When I actually sat down and thought about my typical day, I realized I’m not exactly pushing computational boundaries here. I’m usually focused on one thing at a time, I don’t have fifty Chrome tabs eating memory (I’m that weird person who actually closes tabs), and even when I’m coding, my most intense workload might be running a few Docker containers. Nothing that justifies the small nuclear reactor I built during lockdown boredom.

My Birthday Pi 5 Adventure

So I lucked out and got a Raspberry Pi 5 for my birthday (thanks to some not-so-subtle hinting). At first, I was scratching my head about what to do with it. My other Pi 4s have all ended up in my Kubernetes cluster doing cluster-y things, and I wasn’t sure this one wouldn’t follow the same fate.

Then I stumbled across the Pimoroni NVMe base and had a lightbulb moment. See, the one thing that always killed my previous attempts at using a Pi as an actual computer was the agonizingly slow storage. SD cards are fine for simple server stuff, but trying to use one for desktop computing is like going back to the 90s, and not in a fun nostalgic way.

So I grabbed the NVMe base, slapped in a 2TB drive I had lying around, and figured “what the hell, let’s see if this little thing can actually be my main computer.”

I went with plain old PiOS because honestly, I couldn’t care less about operating systems these days as long as they stay out of my way. I spend 99% of my time in either VS Codium, a terminal, or Chromium anyway, so all the fancy bells and whistles of other OSes just don’t matter much to me.

Two Weeks In: Surprisingly Not Terrible!

After using this setup for a few weeks, I’m honestly shocked by how well it’s working. It’s handling my everyday tasks way better than I expected. The only real issue I’ve run into is when I try watching YouTube full-screen - the poor thing starts cooking itself a bit. But that’s partly on me for just quickly throwing it in a 3D-printed case with only the stock fan. A proper heatsink, PWM fan, and a case that doesn’t trap heat would probably solve that.

The NVMe drive has been a game-changer. After tweaking some boot settings to bump the link from gen 2 to gen 3, I’m consistently getting around 800MB/s speeds. That’s orders of magnitude better than SD card performance and honestly plenty fast for what I’m doing.

I’m not saying it’s going to replace gaming rigs or video editing workstations anytime soon, but for my everyday computing? This tiny £75 computer (plus accessories) is actually holding its own against my electricity-chugging monster. Who would’ve thought?