Some little time ago I acquired a Raspberry Pi 5, my fourth in the series ( 3, 4, 400, now 5).
I set it up, tried various booting options (fast SD card, USB3 SSD, NVMe drive) and various operating systems (Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu, Armbian). All is good, all works well. Interestingly, a good quality V30,U3,A2 card (Sandisk Extreme) works surprisingly well against a NVMe drive, with only one exception*.
I decided to test it against my now 10-year-old iMac. I was truly astonished.
For almost all tasks, it is as fast as, or faster than, the iMac, or the gaming PC that my son assembled some years ago.
* Processing large (> 1GB) files.
I set it up, tried various booting options (fast SD card, USB3 SSD, NVMe drive) and various operating systems (Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu, Armbian). All is good, all works well. Interestingly, a good quality V30,U3,A2 card (Sandisk Extreme) works surprisingly well against a NVMe drive, with only one exception*.
I decided to test it against my now 10-year-old iMac. I was truly astonished.
For almost all tasks, it is as fast as, or faster than, the iMac, or the gaming PC that my son assembled some years ago.
* Processing large (> 1GB) files.