January 9, 2026
When your GPU costs 50x your PC
RTX 5090 and Raspberry Pi: Can It Game?
Internet melts down over a tiny $60 Pi trying to babysit a monster graphics card
TLDR: Someone plugged a huge, ultra‑powerful gaming graphics card into a tiny Raspberry Pi computer and actually got big-budget games to run, though very poorly. The comments erupted into jokes, nostalgia, and arguments over whether this is brilliant nerd art or a completely pointless stunt — and that debate is the real story.
A mad scientist has strapped one of the world’s beefiest gaming graphics cards, the RTX 5090, onto a tiny Raspberry Pi 5 — and the internet can’t decide if this is genius, useless, or just comedy gold. The Pi can technically run blockbuster games like Cyberpunk 2077, but at a hilariously choppy frame rate, turning the experiment into more of a meme than a must‑buy setup.
One commenter instantly invoked the sacred rule of PC nerds: “You didn’t even run Crysis.” For some, that alone invalidates the entire test. Others got nostalgic, pointing out that even a Pi crawling through Cyberpunk is still better than the junk PCs they suffered with in the early 2000s. Another user happily compared the tiny board’s power to decade‑old desktop chips, declaring it basically a throwback gaming rig from the Grand Theft Auto IV era.
But not everyone was impressed. A more serious crowd rolled their eyes and demanded the card be tested in an actually old PC instead of “wasting” it on a hobby board. The winner for best joke goes to the commenter who asked if this was “a Pi with a graphics card or a graphics card with a Pi attached.” That’s the vibe: half science project, half stand‑up routine, and all drama over whether this proves anything beyond “people will plug a GPU into literally anything.”
Key Points
- •An NVIDIA RTX 5090 FE eGPU was connected to a Raspberry Pi 5 using an OCuLink dock and M.2 adapter.
- •The setup was compared against a Beelink MINI-S13 (x86) and Radxa ROCK 5B (ARM), with storage and PCIe slots arranged to accommodate the eGPU.
- •Raspberry Pi 5’s PCIe Gen2 x1 bandwidth (~500 MB/s) is far lower than the Gen3 x4 (~4,000 MB/s) available on the other machines.
- •Standard NVIDIA drivers worked on the Intel-based Beelink, while ARM SBCs required patches to address DMA coherence and memory alignment issues.
- •The author provided packaged NVIDIA drivers for Ubuntu and Fedora, and a screenshot verifies the eGPU functioning on the Raspberry Pi 5.