Raspberry Pi 5 Desktop Replacement?

The desktop tower is outrageously capable and just as hungry on power. Day to day work rarely needs that kind of hardware. Most sessions focus on one task, with the occasional set of Docker containers running in the background. Two RTX 3090s and 128 GB of RAM are impressive, but excessive for this workflow.

Why the Pi 5

A Raspberry Pi 5 arrived as a birthday gift and it sparked the idea to try a simpler daily machine. Previous Pis usually ended up in a small Kubernetes cluster. This time the goal is different: use one Pi as the workstation.

Storage solved with NVMe

The missing piece for desktop use has always been storage speed. A Pimoroni NVMe base fixed that, paired with a basic 2 TB NVMe drive. After switching the boot link to Gen 3 instead of Gen 2, sustained transfers settled around 800 MB. That is more than enough for daily work and vastly better than an SD card.

Software and workflow

Pi OS was the straightforward choice. The day is mostly split across Codium, a terminal, and Chromium, so there is no pull toward a heavyweight operating system with extra features.

Early results

After a few weeks the Pi 5 performs better than expected for these use cases. One weak spot showed up during full screen YouTube: thermals. The current setup uses a stock fan in a quickly printed case. A proper heat sink, a PWM fan, and a more suitable enclosure should resolve it.

Thanks for reading. If you have a reliable cooling combo for a Pi 5 desktop build, share it so others can try it too.