Wrote this about patience

[Warden]

Running local LLMs on a Pi 5 is slow but the privacy argument is genuinely compelling. Your documents never leave your hardware, there is no subscription and the model is yours permanently. For specific use cases that trade-off is completely worth the speed penalty

[Anchor99]

The Raspberry Pi 5, launched in 2023, has settled into its role as the most capable single-board computer available at consumer price points and the DIY and maker community has spent 2026 pushing its capabilities into genuinely unexpected territory. The 4GB model sits at around £55 and the 8GB at £75, price points that have remained stable despite the broader semiconductor cost pressures. A third party active cooler and M.2 HAT for NVMe storage have become de facto standard additions for serious builds, transforming the Pi 5 into a capable low-power mini PC that competes meaningfully with NUC-class Intel devices for specific workloads.

The most interesting development community thread in 2026 has been running local small language models on the Pi 5. Quantised versions of smaller open source models including Phi-3 Mini and Gemma 2B run at acceptable speeds on the 8GB configuration with an NVMe drive for model loading. The inference speed is nowhere near what a GPU cluster delivers but for privacy-first local processing of personal documents, running a home assistant without a cloud subscription or experimenting with AI without a powerful desktop, the Pi 5 is genuinely viable. Several YouTube channels building around this use case have grown substantially in 2026.

The retro gaming community has also found the Pi 5 to be a significant upgrade for emulation. GameCube and Wii emulation through Dolphin, which struggled on the Pi 4, now runs at full speed on most titles. PlayStation 2 emulation through PCSX2 is viable for a significant portion of the library. N64 emulation is essentially perfect. The sub-£100 emulation device built around a Pi 5, a quality case and a decent controller is one of the best value gaming setups available.

Newswww.raspberrypi.com

[Ryan84]

The M.2 HAT addition is the upgrade that changes what the Pi 5 is. The SD card bottleneck was the biggest performance limitation on previous generations. NVMe storage makes it a different device and the price with the HAT is still under £100

[Drift Sentinel]

GameCube and Wii at full speed on a Pi 5 is the emulation milestone that the Pi community has been waiting for. Some of the best games ever made are in that library and they are now accessible to anyone with a £75 board and an afternoon to set it up

[Pete14]

The comparison to NUC-class Intel devices for specific workloads is the key qualifier. There are things the Pi 5 simply cannot do competitively. But for a headless server, a media centre, a light desktop or an emulation machine it is genuinely excellent value

[Inland Renegade]

The YouTube community around Pi projects in 2026 is one of the most creative spaces in DIY tech. The combination of cheap hardware, good documentation and an enthusiastic community produces projects that range from practical to completely absurd and both categories are worth watching

[BigDog_Fan]

Raspberry Pi as a company has also been interesting. The IPO gave them resources but the community has been watching to make sure the commercial direction does not compromise the hobbyist accessibility that made them what they are

[CaptainStatic56]

Phi-3 Mini running on a Pi 5 is a useful reminder that local AI does not require a data centre. The quantisation research that makes these models small enough to run on edge hardware is one of the most practically important threads in the AI field right now