The Kubii website, the official Raspberry distributor in France, has announced the availability of the Raspberry Pi 5 in 16GB RAM version.

A boosted Pi 5, but for what use?

The Raspberry Foundation is kicking off the new year with a Pi 5 boosted by 16 GB of RAM. While this evolution may make sense for uses such as office automation, programming, multitasking or servers, it is totally superfluous for use dedicated to Recalbox.

For optimal use with Recalbox, the Raspberry Pi 5 4 Go is still the ideal solution. It's more than enough to run your PS1 and Dreamcast games, demanding arcade titles (particularly Cave games), and soon, with version 10 of Recalbox, some GameCube games (with a few reservations depending on the title).

Even the 8GB version, offered with the release of the Pi 5, doesn't seem relevant for Recalbox use.

Price comparison

The 16 GB model is priced at 147 €, compared with 69 € for the 4 GB version. We therefore strongly recommend the 4GB version and advise you to invest the money you save in a good microSD card (for example a SanDisk that meets U3 A2 standards) and a quality external storage device. These elements will improve your user experience far more significantly than a few gigs of RAM.

What's more, the 2GB version of the Pi 5, released a few months ago, is now compatible with Recalbox (as we explained in this article). However, we continue to prefer the 4GB version for optimal use, particularly in the context of the release of version 10.

Raspberry Pi 5 specifications (16 GB version)

Finally, with regard to the 16GB model, it's important to note that apart from the RAM, its specifications remain strictly identical to those of the other versions:

• Processor**: Quad-core ARM Cortex-A76 (64-bit, 2.4 GHz)
• GPU**: VideoCore VII (800 MHz)
• Connections**: identical to other versions.

If you're just discovering these microcomputers and how to get to grips with them with Recalbox, we invite you to watch the video below: