Raspberry Pi 5 vs Pi 4: What should your next project use?

As of 5 October 2023, Raspberry Pi 5 is an announced board, with first shipments expected at the end of the month. The decision is less about winning a spec-sheet contest and more about whether a new project needs the features it adds.

If your Raspberry Pi 4 already runs its job reliably, the announcement alone is no reason to replace it. If you are choosing a board for a new build, Raspberry Pi 5 is worth waiting for when its particular improvements match a real requirement and you can verify your accessories and software before committing. This is a pre-release comparison based on Raspberry Pi’s own published specifications and thermal guidance, not a hands-on test.

What Raspberry Pi 5 changes on paper

Raspberry Pi 5 uses a 2.4GHz quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 processor and a VideoCore VII GPU. Raspberry Pi estimates between two and three times the CPU and GPU performance of Raspberry Pi 4 , plus roughly twice the memory and I/O bandwidth. Treat those figures as the manufacturer’s estimates: they do not predict how much faster a particular script, desktop or camera pipeline will run.

The launch announcement gives more specific display figures: Pi 5 can drive two 4K displays at 60Hz at the same time. Pi 4 supports one 4K display at 60Hz or two at 30Hz. If your project needs two high-resolution screens, that is a concrete reason to consider the newer board. If it uses one modest display, the difference may not matter.

The launch announcement also lists two USB 3.0 ports that can operate at 5Gbps simultaneously, two four-lane camera/display interfaces, a PCIe 2.0 x1 interface for fast peripherals, and the familiar 40-pin GPIO header. Storage, cameras and expansion devices may benefit, but a connector specification by itself does not guarantee that a particular drive, HAT, cable or software image will work as expected. Check the exact accessory and operating-system support for your project.

The board comes in 4GB and 8GB memory versions, announced at US$60 and US$80 respectively before local taxes. Choose memory by the applications you intend to run. More RAM does not automatically make a CPU-bound task faster.

These specifications and prices come from Raspberry Pi’s 28 September 2023 launch announcement . The company expected first shipments by the end of October and said preorders were available through many Approved Resellers, so local availability and delivery dates could differ.

Budget for power, cooling and software

A board price is only part of a project budget. Raspberry Pi’s launch notes say a standard 5V, 3A USB-C supply limits downstream USB current to 600mA by default. Its announced 27W USB-C supply supports 5V at 5A and raises that USB limit to 1.6A. If your build uses an SSD, hard drive or other high-power USB device, check the supply and peripheral requirements together before assuming an existing Pi 4 adapter is sufficient.

Cooling depends on workload too. In a 4 October thermal note , Raspberry Pi says cooling is optional for normal use, while a heavy sustained load can cause the board to throttle. The note reports the company’s own stress test; it is useful guidance, not an independent test of every case or project. A continuously compiling, encoding or vision-processing workload deserves a different cooling plan from a light desktop or occasional GPIO task.

Software readiness is another item to check. Raspberry Pi’s launch announcement said a new first-party Raspberry Pi OS based on Debian Bookworm was planned for mid-October and would be the only officially supported first-party OS at Pi 5 launch. If your project depends on a particular image, driver or HAT, check its support status before ordering.

Decide by the problem you need to solve

Wait for Raspberry Pi 5 if a new project will use its faster processor, two 4K60 displays, higher-bandwidth I/O or PCIe expansion, and you can wait for the late-October shipment window. Before making the build permanent, test the actual workload, operating-system image and accessories you plan to use.

Build with Raspberry Pi 4 now if you need a board before then, your project does not use the new capabilities, or the exact Pi 4 parts and software you need are already known to work. If your existing Pi 4 does the job, keep it until a specific bottleneck gives you a reason to change.

For a fair upgrade check after Pi 5 arrives, run the same task on both boards with the same data and software where possible. Record elapsed time, memory use, temperature or throttling, and whether attached devices remain stable. The result for your project is more useful than applying a broad performance estimate to every workload.

As of 5 October 2023, the sensible choice is straightforward: wait for Pi 5 when its announced features solve a real constraint; otherwise, a working Pi 4 remains a reasonable board to keep or use.