Blog
Pi5 compatibility with HiFiBerry products
We could do some initial tests with the new Pi5 and some of our products:
| Product | Compatible |
|---|---|
| DAC+ Standard | yes |
| DAC+ ADC Pro | yes |
| DAC2 Pro | yes |
| DAC2 HD | yes |
| Digi2 Pro HW 2.2 | yes |
| Amp2 | yes |
| Amp4 | yes |
| Amp100 | yes |
| Beocreate 4CA | yes |
| DAC+ Light | yes |
Note that all current amplifier products provide stable power for the Pi5 alone, but won’t be able to supply additional power for power-hungry USB devices.
You might have noticed that we didn’t test all current HiFiBerry sound cards. There simply wasn’t enough time. However, from the initial test results we expect the full range of our currently available products to work with the Pi5.
No Pi3 or Pi4 case will work with the Pi5. We’re working with our partners to offer case solutions for the Pi5 in the future. However, this will take a bit longer than usual as the new thermal design requires active cooling.
A few other observations
The Pi5 is much more sensitive to power supplies. A 5x 5.1V charger with QC capabilities that we use here for years as our standard power supply didn’t work anymore. The Pi5 started, but reproducible crashed after some seconds on the login prompt. However, the power supply from our shop seems to be stable enough also for the Pi5.
Running stress tests that fully utilize the Pi5’s CPU result in a peak power consumption of around 7.5W for some seconds. Without active cooling, the Pi5 will throttle just after a few seconds of full load. If you plan to use the Pi5 for heavy workloads, active cooling is not just optional, but necessary.
The initial boot loader of the Pi5 seems to be a bit faster than the one on the Pi4 (that was much slower than the Pi3). However, it’s still not the fastest system you might find. Booting the preliminary Raspberry Pi OS to the console prompt takes about 19 seconds.
In the preliminary version of Raspberry Pi OS, pressing the power-button on the Pi shuts down the Pi. There is no “sleep mode” as you might know it from your PC or laptop. We don’t know if this feature is planned and if the Pi5’s hardware does support some kind of sleep mode.
We didn’t have any additional documentation of the Pi5 when running these tests. We might have missed some new features of the Pi5.
Some sound cards support I2S master and slave mode depending on the clock configuration, examples are the DAC2 Pro and the Amp100. While older Pi’s could switch between master and slave mode during sound card initialisation, this is not possible with the Pi5 anymore. We’re working on updates to create updated drivers for these cards. Also note that (as far as we understand it) the mixing master and slave hardware on the same Pi isn’t possible anymore. This means, it is very important to disable the onboard sound when using our sound cards.
Update 14.3.
The driver updates have now been merged into the Linux kernel (version current 6.1.77 ). Have a look at our new blog post about the required changes.
October 3, 2023
