Absolutely. If you have a 5V @ 2A power budget the advice would be to use a Pi which requires 10W or less.Don't forget, we still sell almost all the earlier models, so if you need something with less power consumption, it's still available.
My curiosity is in what can be done with a Pi 5 if you had such a budget; is it possible to take advantage of some of the things a Pi 5 offers which older Pi don't ?
Similar to a Zero 2W requiring 2A replacing a Zero with a 5V @ 1.5A budget if cores are disabled. You won't get more cores, but you get 64-bit operation and wireless. That may make it a worthwhile replacement.
It's simply the other side of "If I have this PI then what power supply do I need?" - "If I have this power supply which Pi can I use, to what extent are they usable?"
Ok...
It's was absolutely persisting down here this morning and I was bored; So, I did a bit of very basic and not terribly scientific testing. (So please; nobody take this as advice in any way shape of form. It's just anecdotal really)
I plugged the Pi5 into some power sources that I just happen to have lying around to see what would happen...
Pi5 setup.
Raspberry Pi Os Bookworm; up to date with latest firmware.
USB mouse and keybooard in the USB2 ports
Active cooler
Sansung evo plus 64Gb sdcard
Official box with lid on...in pink and white.
Power sources
Official Pi 4/400 power supply
Monitor USB port.
12v/5v USB charging socket with loose cable) (which is used daily to power a 400; very successfully)
Old phone charger rated at 2A with a loose USB cable.
Method.
Plug each one in turn and on each;
Note any power warning signals. If there are any; run vcgencmd get_throttled
Try to do a bit of basic web browsing including youtube...to get a subjective feel
run vkcube to see what the 3D graphics is like.
Not included
Running any USB peripherals other than the mouse and keyboard.
No formal benchmarks. this was all based on subjective feel.
Results
The only scenario when the Pi5 refused to boot at all, was using the USB socket on the screen. (not a huge surprise; I think it's 0.5A or something
)With both the old phone charger (say 2A on it) and the Pi4 power supply, I noticed no visible difference in performance and no throttling occurred.
Using one of the 5v USB sockets on our chart table that do power a 400 quite successfully, I got power warnings on the screen and vcgencmd get_throttled gave me 0x5000. vkcube still ran; not perceptibly slower and so did web browsing, also; not perceptibly slower; which suggest to me that even throttled the Pi5 is fast in practical terms. Most importantly...it still ran!! I've read elsewhere that the Pi5 throttled is actually still faster than the Pi4; unthrottled...Maybe someone else can confirm if that's true or not?
I have a USB multimeter thingy. I plugged that in and compared the draw between the Pi400 (which wasn't throttling and the Pi5 which was wasn't to compare the two. Surprisingly, the difference wasn't much. 2.02 Amps for the 400 and 2.08 Amps for the Pi5. (Voltage was 5.09V)
Conclusion
My own very subjective conclusion...of this really not very scientific test is that the Pi 5 seems remarkably tolerant to low power and even if put on a power diet is still a pretty potent beast!
I suspect that there will be issues if you want to run high powered USB devices direct off the PI5...But I haven't tried it and that's no different really than earlier models. On the 400; even with the official power supply; I've found that many USB devices required need a powered hub.
Statistics: Posted by kip_the_elder — Tue Apr 30, 2024 11:26 am