December 20, 2025
Tiny Pi, giant GPU, bigger drama
Big GPUs don't need big PCs
A $400 Pi rig nearly matches a $2k desktop—cue chaos
TLDR: A Raspberry Pi powered multiple Nvidia GPUs almost as fast as a pricey desktop, but at far lower cost and energy. Commenters split between embracing mini low-power rigs, demanding gaming tests, and warning of setup headaches—sparking a bigger debate about cheap, efficient home AI and the future of PCs.
The internet did a double-take when a tiny Raspberry Pi pushed four beefy Nvidia GPUs and delivered responses within 2% of a modern server in Llama 3 tests—11.83 tokens per second vs 12. The crowd went wild, then immediately split into camps. The “mini-machine revolution” folks cheered, with one commenter plotting to switch to a $300 low-power box and just remote into a big workstation when needed. Another crowd—the “show me the gaming” skeptics—demanded frame-rate receipts, noting ARM chips (the phone-style brains inside a Pi) don’t run most PC games without clunky emulation tools like FEX. Meanwhile, practical tinkerers worried about mysterious “BAR” memory quirks and asked if this setup is plug-and-play or a weekend-long boss fight. The big-picture hot take? Some said ditch the whole “cable spaghetti” and put the graphics and CPU on the same chip—like Apple and Nvidia already do—while efficiency nerds swooned over the Pi sipping just 4–5W at idle vs a PC’s 30W. With a Dolphin ICS PCIe switch and a wild GitHub thread showing 4 GPUs on one Pi, it’s equal parts miracle, meme, and midlife PC crisis.
Key Points
- •A Raspberry Pi 5 with an eGPU can deliver performance within 2–5% of a modern desktop in many tasks, while using far less power.
- •A multi‑GPU Raspberry Pi setup with four Nvidia RTX A5000s achieved 11.83 tokens/s on Llama 3 70B, within ~2% of an Intel server using the same GPUs.
- •External PCIe switches (Gen 4/5) enable GPUs to share memory over the bus, reducing bottlenecks from the Pi’s single PCIe Gen 3 x1 lane.
- •Estimated costs excluding GPUs: $350–$400 for the Pi eGPU setup vs $1,500–$2,000 for a comparable Intel desktop build.
- •Idle power draw measured 4–5W for the Pi setup vs ~30W for the desktop PC, highlighting efficiency gains.