Raspberry Pi 500+ Benchmarks: Mechanical Keyboard Computer, 16GB RAM & NVMe SSD
👁 Raspberry Pi 500+ keyboard disassembly
The mechanical keyboard on the Raspberry Pi 500+ is pleasant to use and there is also LED lighting for those interested in that aspect. The Raspberry Pi 500+ is using Clicky Gateron Blue KS-33 mechanical keyboard switches. Manipulating the Raspberry Pi 500+ keyboard LEDs can be done via a command-line tool or Python library.
The Raspberry Pi 500+ uses the same quad-core Cortex-A76 Broadcom SoC as the Raspberry Pi 5/500 and same RP1 I/O controller. The 16GB of RAM is using LPDDR4X-4267 memory. The NVMe SSD included for $200 is a pre-installed 246GB Raspberry Pi SSD.
👁 Raspberry Pi 500 vs. Raspberry Pi 500+
Like the Raspberry Pi 500, the Pi 500+ model still features 802.11 n/ac WiFi, Bluetooth 5.0 / BLE, Gigabit Ethernet, dual USB 3.0 ports and one USB 2.0 port, two micro HDMI display outputs, 40-pin GPIO header access, and running off 5V DC power via USB.
I've only had a few days with the Raspberry Pi 500+ so far but it has been working out very well. Doubling the RAM and moving to NVMe SSD helps in delivering better performance for many workloads even with the same SoC as the Raspberry Pi 500. For some benchmarks here are tests of the Raspberry Pi 500 with 8GB of RAM and microSD storage compared to the Raspberry Pi 500+ with 16GB of RAM and 256GB Samsung MZ9LQ256HBJD-00BVL (Raspberry Pi SSD). Both Raspberry Pi 500 models were tested using the Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS with the Linux 6.12 kernel.