Great to have this confirmed @volumio - thank you.
Is it also safe to assume Volumio will not evolve an above-2GB RAM need in the future?
That’d be a good vote-of-confidence for anyone hoping to future-proof via a passively-cooled Pi4, vs. buying a model that requires active cooling.
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I don’t see as of now any reason to bump the RAM requirements of Volumio in the future.
I am very curious to test the new PI5. We will of course try our best to make Volumio compatible with it asap.
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As Mi just stated, for Volumio the rPi4-2GB is enough.
If you planning to load plugins like LMS, More GB will be helpful, so is more CPU power.
So here a rPi5 would benefit LMS in performance.
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Thanks to those who have expertly answered questions directed at me.
If this Pi generation is like recent ones, many people will be buying Pi5s in preference to 4s because there won’t be a big price difference between them, memory size determines price in Pi world, and more Pi5 stock is likely to be available as Pi4 production slacks off.
So even if you underclock a 2GB Pi5 from 2.4 to 1.8 GHz (ie slow it to about the CPU speed of a Pi4), you’ll still have a slightly better featured and cooler running product than the equivalent Pi4.
Really the only downsides I can see are that some software development effort will be required but everyone managed that before a few times, and it might take a while for boards and other doodads like cases and adapters and hats to reach market. It looks like another solid but not very scary upgrade cycle.
I doubt I can resist buying one for long. Must…wait…for…further…testing…
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You’re absolutely right!
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haha, I failed within 3 minutes.
I do question myself, how HAT’s will fit with the mandatory cooling.
Yes, as the CPUs get hotter the hat thing looks less practical. Perhaps I should have said expansion boards. It might be a while before Volumio needs the new PCIe slot, I suspect.
Ribbon cable from the GPIO header still works for hats though.
But, where did we see that cooling is mandatory?
In any case, @Ytheleus is absolutely right. We can downclock it until passive cooling is enough…
Reading on other forums I understand the Pi 5 will run just fine without a fan as long as the Pi 5 isn’t put under too much stress in which case the processor will throttle in order to protect itself from overheating.
I understand that Volumio is not too intensive and from what I can gather, it should work fine without a fan.
Depending on which forum you visit and what your going to run.
Those mentioning, cooling is not mandatory, also mention they ran tests by leaving the rPi bare on the desk. But just letting the rPi going up to 80+ degC and rely on CPU throttling is not my cup of tea.
Correct I think. Cooling of Pis is a topic in itself. I’m sort of against ever running a Pi at throttling temperature on the general principle that it’s right at the edge of the designed thermal envelope. It feels like poor practice even though you can argue it might not matter.
In the case of Volumio, the Pi5 has so much processing power in reserve you can manually underclock it by a large margin quite easily (change a number in a file), which feels more controlled and conscious than just accepting that throttling will occur and not caring.
The middle ground in my view is to get hold of a cheapish (£10/$12) aluminium passive case. On a Pi4 it completely prevents throttling but doesn’t involve noisy fans so Pi devices are easier to live with that way.
Not clear yet how this will play out with Pi5 running at stock speeds, but interesting to note that an early firmware update on Pi4s had a good effect on heat generation, so to some extent the firmware decides how cool a Pi runs.
It’s certainly true that a bare board with zero cooling under stress testing software will start throttling inside a minute. You can run it like that. I wouldn’t.
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Thanks for the info which is more informative and detailed than my initial reading through various forums.
I have the excellent Allo Boss v1.2 DAC HAT which I will probably run bare with the Pi5 until a suitable case is produced.
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Jeff Geerling in his YouTube preview has some temp graphs under a few different cooling regimes at about ten minutes in, if you are so inclined. I haven’t seen any well designed passive testing at stock speeds, but the bare board looks toasty.
Can we expect a better responsiveness of the GUI compared to the Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2?
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You get a better responsiveness already with the RPi4, no need to wait for the RPi5
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Hi Ytheleus,
if I only need to change one number in a file then this seems to me to be the silver bullet!
But where can I find this file and what is the parameter in it that I have to change?
Regards Axel
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Hi, I admit that by ‘quite easily’ I mean quite easily for the sort of people who discuss arcane specs of newly released Pi models, but for one usual underclocking method the file is \boot\config.txt and the main parameter is arm_freq_max = some number, or maybe arm_freq, I’m not sure exactly how Volumio is underclocked but it’s something like that.
It is probably worth looking up or watching a tutorial by someone who is good at explaining, but the hacky method would be to, say, halve ‘some number’ and see how she goes. I do not recommend the hacky method, nor am I responsible if your house burns down or something as a result. 
found all what’s needed here
great also that one easily can check the temperature by entering
emphasized text
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Yeah, what Jeff said. I knew that, mostly. I don’t recommend playing with voltages unless you know your onions, but dropping CPU and graphics frequencies within reason is OK.
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Why buy an RPi5?
Because it’s shiney and new!
Obviously if all you are ever going to use it for is for Volumio, and never intend to re-purpose it, then, yeah, sure, it’s overkill.
I am a hobbyist, so repurposing RPis is a thing.
I’ll get a RPi5. I’ll run Volumio on it and see if it’s better than my Pi4 and/or Pi3B+. I suspect that after playing with it for some time, I’ll revert to running Volumio with either my 3B+ or 4 then use the 5 for something which will make use of it’s enhanced capability.
After all repurposing is usually just a swap of a microSD card.