Everything You Need: A Hands-On Review of the Raspberry Pi 500 and Raspberry Pi Monitor

The successor to the highly popular Raspberry Pi 400, a throwback design that packs the power of a Raspberry Pi 4 into a keyboard chassis inspired by home computers of the 1980s and 1990s, is here, and it has brought a friend: meet the Raspberry Pi 500 and the Raspberry Pi Monitor.

The Raspberry Pi 500, despite its diminutive stature, features the same system-on-chip as the Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer — but this time in a form factor that makes it easy to deploy in classrooms, bedrooms, living rooms, and anywhere else you can fit a keyboard, mouse, and monitor.

On the latter front Raspberry Pi has also launched its first consumer-grade display, the 15.6" Raspberry Pi Monitor — ideal for use with the Raspberry Pi 500 and other models in the range, capable of being powered entirely over USB and with a Full HD display and built-in stereo speakers.

Is Raspberry Pi onto another winner? Let's dive in and find out.

The hardware

Raspberry Pi 500

• CPU: Broadcom BCM2712 4-core up-to-2.4GHz Arm Cortex-A76 (16nm)
• GPU: Broadcom Videocore-VII
• Hardware video decode: H.265 4k60
• Hardware video encode: None
• "Southbridge"chip: Raspberry Pi RP1 (40nm)
• RAM: 8GB LPDDR4x at 4,267MHz
• Storage: microSD (32GB included)
• USB: 2× USB 3.0, 1× USB 2.0
• PCI Express: None
• Network: Gigabit Ethernet, dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
• Display outputs: 2× 4k60 HDMI
• Camera inputs: None
• GPIO: 40-pin header (populated)
• Power: USB Type-C 5V 5A
• Cost: $90; $120 for Desktop Kit bundle with mouse, 27W USB Type-C PSU, 2m micro-HDMI to HDMI cable, The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner's Guide book

Raspberry Pi 15.6" Monitor:

• Size: 15.6", 16:9 aspect ratio
• Panel: IPS LCD, matte anti-glare coating
• Resolution: 1920×1080 (Full HD), 60Hz
• Color depth: 24-bit, 8bpc, 16.2 million colors
• Brightness: 250cd/m² (typical)
• Audio: 2× 1.2W speakers, 3.5mm headphone jack
• Inputs: 1× HDMI 1.4
• Power: 5V 1.5A via USB Type C, can be powered from a Raspberry Pi USB port at reduced brightness and volume
• Stand: Adjustable, VESA mount points
• Price: $100

Externally, the Raspberry Pi 500 looks a lot like a Raspberry Pi 400. The same chiclet-style keyboard, with only a minor change to the layout to provide a dedicated power button at the top-right, in the same slightly-angled plastic housing. The two-tone red-and-white chassis is gone, though, replaced by a pure-white colorway — though the presence of a marking for color on the packaging suggests that a black variant may follow in the near future.

You'll find the ports at the rear of the machine, next to a handy Kensington-style locking slot for security. The new machine includes all the same ports as the Raspberry Pi 400, though in a different order: from left to right you'll find a single USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, a microSD card slot with a bundled Raspberry Pi-brand 32GB card pre-installed, a USB Type-C power input, two micro-HDMI ports each good for a 4k60 external display, a 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) port covered by a removable rubber protector, and a gigabit Ethernet port.

Crack open the screwless chassis and you'll find another familiar friend: a chunky slab of metal, acting to both protect the electronics and as a heatsink for the hot-running Broadcom BCM2712 system-on-chip. There are no fancy fins here, and nowhere to mount a fan; the smooth metal cools the chip entirely passively, and — as you'll see later in our review — does a surprisingly good job of it.

The single-board computer at the heart of the Raspberry Pi 500, which is effectively an elongated Raspberry Pi 5, is revealed when you remove the heatsink. It's here that you'll see some surprises, along with a major disappointment: while the PCB includes footprints for an M.2 M-key slot, which should be connected to the BCM2712's PCI Express Gen. 2 lane, it's unpopulated — meaning there's no way to connect a Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) drive, or other PCIe device, to the Raspberry Pi 500.

The presence of the footprint, though, suggests two possibilities. The least likely, given Raspberry Pi's usual attention to detail, is that the exclusion of the M.2 slot was a last-minute decision reached too late to redesign the PCB. More likely is that the footprint is there for a potential successor device — also hinted at by the presence of a large number of unpopulated footprints to the upper-left of the board, including one connector that would come out at the rear where the Kensington-compatible security slot currently sits.

At the same time as the Raspberry Pi 500, Raspberry Pi has launched its first in-house consumer-grade monitor — separate from the hobbyist- and industrial-focused touchscreen panels it has released in the past. This is a slick 15.6" Full HD unit with anti-glare screen, built-in stereo speakers, headphone output, and a single HDMI input, and it has one feature that makes it an ideal companion for the Raspberry Pi 500: it can be powered from one of the USB ports without requiring a dedicated power supply. Doing so, however, does limit the brightness to 60% and the volume to 50%; using a dedicated power supply capable of 5V at 1.5A or greater unlocks full brightness and volume.

The monitor's adjustable stand is functional, though if you prefer your monitor to be raised higher or at a 90° angle to the desk you'll have to splash out for a third-party VESA-compatible desk stand. The VESA mounting points, meanwhile, can only be used when the stand is pushed all the way to the top of the monitor — meaning they can't be used to mount a Raspberry Pi, or other compact computer, in a VESA-compatible case, unless you fancy propping the monitor up against a nearby wall.

Performance

When the Raspberry Pi 400 launched four years ago, it did so with an interesting bonus: an extra 300MHz on the CPU clock, compared to the stock settings for the Raspberry Pi 4 at launch. This time around, there's no such tweak: the Raspberry Pi 500's BCM2712 runs its four Arm Cortex-A76 CPU cores and Broadcom Videocore-VII GPU at the same speed as the Raspberry Pi 5.

Anyone who's read our review of the Raspberry Pi 5 — or the recently-launched Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5, the computer-on-module built around the same BCM2712 chip — will know exactly what that means: anything between a doubling to a tripling in performance for real-world workloads compared to the Raspberry Pi 400. Exact performance gains will vary, naturally, but our testing revealed that desktop tasks like image editing, optical character recognition, and web app use enjoy a 1.95×, 2.19×, and 2.94× performance boost respectively.

There's another performance-boosting feature of the Raspberry Pi 500 over its predecessor, too: a doubling of RAM, from 4GB to 8GB. At the time of writing, that was the only variant of Raspberry Pi 500 available — though should a successor with a functional M.2 slot truly be in the works, it's possible that it may launch with a 16GB option to match the top-end model of Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5. There's also the possibility of a cost-reduced 4GB variant, which would still provide plenty of memory for most tasks bar on-device machine learning and multi-tab web browsing — but, so far, Raspberry Pi's saying nothing about its roadmap.

A big issue with the Raspberry Pi 5's out-of-the-box performance is in how hot the BCM2712 chip runs: under sustained all-core CPU and GPU workloads the processor's thermal throttle point is hit in as little as 30 seconds, dropping the clock speed from 2.4GHz to 1.5GHz. It's for this reason the official Raspberry Pi 5 case includes a cooling fan — and why Raspberry Pi also offers an optional heatsink and fan assembly. With just a slab of metal, sandwiched between two piece of plastic, you'd be forgiven for thinking heat will be a concern for the Raspberry Pi 500 too — but, thankfully, you'd be wrong.

Under our thermal torture test — in which the CPU and GPU cores are loaded with an artificially-taxing continuous workload for ten minutes, then allowed to cool — the Raspberry Pi 500 maintained its full 2.4GHz clock speed for the entirety of the run. In fact, it never even got close to throttling: the highest temperature we recorded was 68°C (154.4°F), and the temperature dropped rapidly once the test was over. For anyone who finds the quiet but audible whine of the Raspberry Pi 5's fan options an annoyance, then, the Raspberry Pi 500 could be the answer.

The biggest surprise came during our testing of the Raspberry Pi 500's power draw. The doubling-or-better in performance of the Raspberry Pi 5 came at the cost of increased power draw, and the same is true of the Raspberry Pi 500 — but only under load. When fully loaded on the CPU and GPU, the Raspberry Pi 500 drew 9.7W — a roughly 40% increase over the 6.97W of the Raspberry Pi 400. At idle, though, it drew just 2.28W — less than the 2.48W of its predecessor. As with earlier models, however, there's a phantom power draw issue: with the Raspberry Pi 500 "turned off," but ready to respond to a press of the power switch, we measured a continuous draw of 1.57W — which could only be prevented by physically unplugging the power cable.

Trade-offs

With its integrated keyboard, which is entirely functional if nothing particularly special, high performance, and passive cooling, the Raspberry Pi 500 may seem like the perfect device for anyone considering a Raspberry Pi 5 — but there are trade-offs to consider. As well as the gains, there are a few losses — the biggest of which is that there's no way to access the BCM2712's PCIe Gen. 2 lane, meaning no support for NVMe storage, the Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+, or the Raspberry Pi AI HAT+.

That's the toughest blow, but it's not the only one to consider. The built-in keyboard means that you're down to just one user-accessible USB 2.0 port instead of two, and the positioning of the 40-pin GPIO header at the rear makes it difficult to use without a third-party extension cable and breakout. Like the Raspberry Pi 400, there are also no MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) inputs — and no Display Serial Interface (DSI) outputs either, compared to two combined CSI/DSI ports on the Raspberry Pi 5.

Another loss is in Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) support, which is achievable on the Raspberry Pi 5 with an optional HAT but unsupported on the Raspberry Pi 500. That one's a real shame, especially given that you can power the Raspberry Pi Monitor from one of the Raspberry Pi 500's USB ports: being able to set up a fully-functional computer and 15.6" Full HD display with nothing going to the wall but a single Ethernet cable would have made for some very tidy desks.

If you're not planning on using PCIe devices, don't need MIPI CSI or DSI ports, can handle a somewhat-awkward GPIO header position, don't need PoE, and can live with three USB ports or are willing to pick up Raspberry Pi's recently-released USB hub, there's a lot to recommend the Raspberry Pi 500. With its integrated keyboard, all you need to get started is a mouse, display, and power supply — and if you pick up the Raspberry Pi 500 Desktop Kit, you'll get the mouse, power supply, and a suitable HDMI cable included alongside a copy of The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner's Guide. Just add a monitor — maybe even, the company surely hopes, the new Raspberry Pi Monitor — and you're off to the races.

Conclusion

If you're a convert to the keyboard-computer form factor, either due to fond memories of the Atari 400, Commodore Amiga 500, and other 1980s and 1990s microcomputers that gave Raspberry Pi its inspiration for what was once known as "Project Gemini" or as an owner of an existing Raspberry Pi 400, the Raspberry Pi 500 is a stellar example. For those looking at a four-year-post-launch upgrade, you'll get a major bump in performance — and if you've been annoyed at the thermal performance of the Raspberry Pi 5, its larger sibling will turn that frown upside down.

This time around, though, it's possible Raspberry Pi has cut one corner too many. The Raspberry Pi 400 packed most of the features of the Raspberry Pi 4, with the biggest loss being a lack of MIPI CSI inputs; the Raspberry Pi 500, sadly, goes a few steps further, and with the user-accessible PCIe lane being a big draw for the Raspberry Pi 5 its removal in the Raspberry Pi 500 is likely to sting.

That there are footprints on the PCB for an M.2 slot, and mounting points for M.2 modules, may give purchasers a reason to pause: while the Raspberry Pi 500 is a fantastic device in its own right, if there are plans to launch an upgraded version with M.2 support — which, at the time of writing, Raspberry Pi had not confirmed — might it be worth waiting for that? For anyone looking for maximum performance, whether for storage or for accelerating on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads, it may well be prudent to hold fire on a purchase — but the Raspberry Pi range has never been about raw performance, and if you're that focused on raw compute power an Intel- or AMD-powered mini-PC will deliver much more bang for not that much more money.

For everyone else, the Raspberry Pi 500 is easy to recommend. The keyboard is comfortable, and somehow manages to be smaller than most despite also including a fully-functional personal computer. At $90, it's very reasonably priced compared to a Raspberry Pi 5 8GB board — and the inclusion of a 32GB Raspberry Pi-branded microSD card, pre-loaded with the latest Raspberry Pi OS, is a nice bonus. Add in the Raspberry Pi Monitor for an extra $100, a power supply, and your choice of mouse, and you've got a compact and well-designed workstation that'll see you through the next four years or so with ease.

The Raspberry Pi 500, Raspberry Pi 500 Desktop Kit, and Raspberry Pi Monitor are now available to order from Raspberry Pi resellers; the Raspberry Pi 500 is available in US and UK keyboard layouts at launch, with German, Spanish, French, Italian, Nordic, and Japanese variants to follow in the coming months; the Raspberry Pi Monitor is available in white and red now, with a black version due in early 2025.