Raspberry Pi 500 features the same quad-core 64-bit Arm processor and RP1 I/O controller found in Raspberry Pi 5. With a one-piece aluminium heatsink built in for improved thermal performance, your Raspberry Pi 500 will run fast and smoothly even under heavy load, while delivering glorious dual 4K display output.
It is ideal for surfing the web, creating and editing documents, watching videos, and learning to program using the Raspberry Pi OS desktop environment.
For me its an ideal way to begin python programming, interfacing with electronics sensors and linux – if you have browsed this site you will notice these are my favourites.
If you’re upgrading from a Pi 400 you should see improvements over the Raspberry PI 400. It comes with 8GB RAM as standard making it well equipped to handle memory intensive tasks like tabbed web browsing and the improved CPU and GPU should keep everything zipping along quickly whilst feeling nice and responsive.
What do you get and need?
The Raspberry Pi 500 keyboard unit comes with a 32GB microSD card pre-loaded with Raspberry Pi OS, so it’s super quick to get going. It doesn’t include a power supply, so you’ll probably want to add one of those to your cart.
If you need a complete Raspberry Pi 500 setup, there is a Raspberry Pi 500 Desktop Kit which comes with a mouse, a USB-C power supply and an HDMI cable, along with the Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide. Since I had these with with my collection of Raspberry Pi hardware, I didn’t need these.
The Raspberry Pi 500 has an RJ45 Ethernet port, so if you have an Ethernet cable you can use a wired internet/LAN connection instead of using the onboard WiFi. I use the Wifi to test out and it detected my network and connected as expected.
Features
| Processor | 2.4GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 CPU, with cryptography extensions |
| 512KB per-core L2 caches and 2MB shared L3 cache | |
| Memory | 8GB LPDDR4X-4267 SDRAM |
| Connectivity | Dual-band (2.4GHz and 5.0GHz) IEEE 802.11b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi® |
| Bluetooth 5.0, BLE | |
| Gigabit Ethernet | |
| 2x USB 3.0 ports and 1x USB 2.0 port | |
| GPIO | Horizontal 40-pin GPIO header |
| Video & sound | 2x micro HDMI ports (supports up to 4Kp60) |
| Multimedia | H.265 (4Kp60 decode) |
| OpenGL ES 3.0 graphics | |
| SD card support | MicroSD card slot for operating system and data storage |
| Keyboard | 78-, 79- or 83-key compact keyboard (depending on regional variant) |
| Power | 5V DC via USB connector |
| Operating temperature | 0°C to +50°C |
| Dimensions | 286mm x 122mm x 23mm (maximum) |
| Production lifetime | Raspberry Pi 500 will remain in production until at least January 2034 |
Images
Here are some images I took
This is the Raspberry 500 being unboxed, as stated I bought the keyboard only option.
Now lets look at the rear of the Raspberry PI 400 and Raspberry PI 500 for comparison purposes
You can see the ports have been moved, especially the GPIO one which had a cover on the Raspberry Pi 500, which I removed. You can see the same amount of USB ports that again have been moved around.
There a couple of hats that make it easier to connect to the GPIO port which is one of the features I like on the Raspberry PI’s
Now lets look at the the Raspberry PI 400 and Raspberry PI 500 for comparison purposes from a top view
The Raspberry Pi 400 is the bottom one. As you can see the keyboards are very similar, the keyboard is very similar in size.
Price
The price come in at the following, I would not be paying more than these prices.
Unit only: $90
Desktop kit: $120
Links
- Raspberry Pi 500 Announcement Blog Post
- Raspberry Pi 500 Product Brief
- Raspberry Pi 500 Documentation
