RTX 5090 and Raspberry Pi: Can it game?

Post by WithinReason » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:59 AM UTC

hereonout2 wrote: post #85

alnwlsn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would make a lousy desktop computer even if it was 10x as powerful. - high current 5V USB power supply you probably don't have - HDMI micro port you have like 1 cable for - PCIe through very fragile ribbon cable + hodgepodge of adapters - more adapters needed for SSD - no case, but needs ample airflow - power input is on the side and sticks out GPIO is the killer feature, but I'll be honest, 99% of the hardware ha…

I dunno, I brought a pi 500+ with an SSD, 16GB RAM, little screen, PSU, mouse and cables. It was around £300. It's not super powerful but my young kids use it to surf the net, play Minecraft, do art projects, etc. (we are yet to play with the gpio). I don't get on with the keyboard but otherwise would make a decent development machine for me, considering my development starts with me ssh'ing into some remote VM and r…

Post by hypercube33 » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 10:09 AM UTC

nomel wrote: post #74

alnwlsn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would make a lousy desktop computer even if it was 10x as powerful. - high current 5V USB power supply you probably don't have - HDMI micro port you have like 1 cable for - PCIe through very fragile ribbon cable + hodgepodge of adapters - more adapters needed for SSD - no case, but needs ample airflow - power input is on the side and sticks out GPIO is the killer feature, but I'll be honest, 99% of the hardware ha…

I never really understood how GPIO is a killer feature with them. There are so many ways to get GPIO, from $5 USB dongles to any microcontroller/dev board that's ever exists. What's special about Raspberry Pi GPIO that I'm missing? The only case I can think of is very heavy compute that relies on low latency GPIO related to that compute?

Post by KurSix » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 11:32 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #35

This is a funny project. Too many people taking this serious, it is more of a 'can it be done' because the physical interfaces suggest that it should be possible, and then to follow through on it to prove that yes it actually can be done. And tbh much better than I expected it to work. I can imagine that for GPU compute heavy and interconnect bandwidth constrained applications a combination like this might actually b…

Post by KurSix » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 11:36 AM UTC

drnick1 wrote: post #16

I think the conclusion here is that Raspberry Pis are now too pricey (especially when factoring in the various required accessories) and rarely make sense for typical desktop use vs. x86 mini-PCs. They make even less sense compared to various used thin clients that can generally be found on eBay.

Post by regularfry » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 11:49 AM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #77

baby_souffle wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what does it mean for a GPU to drive a boot sequence It's a quirk of the broadcom chips that the rpi family uses; the GPU is the first bit of silicon to power up and do things. The GPU specifically is a bit unusual, but the general idea of "smaller thing does initial bring up, then powers up $main_cpu" is not unusual once $main_cpu is ~ powerful enough to run linux.

That’s interesting, particularly since as far as I can tell, nothing in userland really bothers to make use of its GPU. I would really like to understand why, since I have a whole bunch of Pi’s and it seems like their GPUs can’t be used for much of anything (not really much for transcoding nor for AI).