Single-board computers have never been more popular than they are these days, and the Raspberry Pi is perhaps the most favoured flavour of them all. With the launch of the new 500+, Raspberry is hoping to attract even more computing hobbyists to the fray, though what one modder has managed to achieve already suggests that its appeal could be even bigger than expected.
The Raspberry Pi 500+ is a fairly decent update on the previous Pi 500, changing the basic keyboard for an RGB-toting mechanical setup, doubling the system RAM from eight to 16 GB of LPDDR4x, and fitting an NVMe M.2 slot to the Pi 5's circuit board. This last aspect is the point of note here, because of what software engineer and modder Jeff Geerling chose to do with it.
Rather than use it for the intended addition of a small SSD, Geerling took advantage of the fact that the M.2 slot is just a physical interface for a PCI Express connection. That means, with the help of an appropriate adapter, you can stuff pretty much any PCIe device into that slot, and the Pi 500+ should recognise it.
In Geerling's case, the stuffing comprised an OCuLink cable, an external GPU dock, a Radeon RX 7900 XT, and a mere 15 lines of additional code to the GPU's Linux drivers to make it all work. Now, even though the 7900 XT is more than capable of running something like Cyberpunk 2077, the rest of the Pi 5…err…isn't, but that doesn't mean you can't game on it.
Thanks to Box64, an x86 emulator for Arm64 and other architectures, Geerling successfully installed Steam on the mega-GPU'd 500+ and got Horizon Chase Turbo to run at 118 fps. That might not sound very fast, given that it was an RX 7900 XT handling all of the graphics, but the Pi 5 only sports a tiny 2.4 GHz four-core processor, along with a single Gen 3 PCIe lane.
To be fair, though, this isn't the first time that Geerling has made a Pi 5 go brrrrrt, as he did a very similar thing last year, getting Doom 3 to run at 60 fps in 4K. For me, what makes the 500+ project impressive is just how neat and tidy the whole solution is. I don't mean in regards to the tidiness of the cables, or anything like that, I'm talking about the paltry amount of code required to make it work.
It's been a long time since I've used my Raspberry Pi (an original Model B from 2012) in anger, and while I know I won't be able to shoehorn the RTX 5090 that's currently sat on my desk (I promise I'm not using it as a paperweight), I must admit to being tempted to dust off the old board and see what I can get it to do.
Sadly, I just know that I'll be instantly distracted by another cool modding project and my old Pi will once again be relegated to the bottom of a drawer. Sorry about that Raspberry.
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