It has been over ten months since the launch of the Raspberry Pi 5. The new board entered the SBC market with an improved Broadcom BCM2712C1, opening doors for many resource-intensive projects.

At launch, the Raspberry Pi 5 was available in two variants. One featured 4 GB of RAM, while the other had 8 GB. Now, the company has launched a third configuration with 2 GB of RAM. As the base model of the lineup, it has the most affordable price tag, coming in at $50.

To compare, the Raspberry Pi 5 with 4 GB of RAM costs $60, while the 8 GB option goes for $80 (kit available on Amazon). Of course, it's not just the RAM capacity that has seen a change in the newer variant of the SBC. As the company details, the 2 GB board comes with the Broadcom BCM2712D0 SoC.

At the core, it's identical to the BCM2712C1 found in the 4 GB and 8 GB variants of the SBC, but with non-Raspberry Pi-specific logic removed. Raspberry Pi says that the 2 GB Pi 5 is the first SBC to use the cost-optimized version of the BCM2712C1 SoC. The company further details that the functionality should be identical from the user's perspective.

So, besides the optimized processor, lower memory capacity, and reduced price, the new variant of Raspberry Pi 5 doesn't have any other differences compared to the options. As for whether the $10 difference from the 4 GB board is worth it, it will depend on what you intend to do with the SBC. To illustrate, for game emulations, more RAM capacity will result in a much better performance.