What Can You Actually Do with PCIe on Raspberry Pi 5?

You might be familiar with PCI Express (PCIe) technology on your PC motherboard: they’re the slots you use to add peripherals like a graphics card. But did you know that the Raspberry Pi now also has a PCIe slot? If you’re wondering what you can use it for, then you’re in the right place!

The Raspberry Pi 5 has a PCIe connector on board. It can be used to add storage, network adapters, AV cards, and other high-speed peripherals. These add-ons expand the types of projects the Raspberry Pi can take on.

Let me show you some examples of what’s possible. I’ll talk about the more common uses and throw in some interesting ones you may not have realized were possible with the Raspberry Pi. Let’s jump to it.

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PCIe on Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is the most versatile single-board computer (SBC) in the world, and part of the reason for its success is that you can connect peripherals to equip it with extra powers.

The most obvious way to add peripherals is via the Raspberry Pi’s USB ports. These support convenient plug-and-play devices you might also use on a regular PC, like a wireless keyboard or microphone.

The second way to add functionality might be less obvious to newcomers, and that’s the GPIO pins. They let your Pi interface with electronic circuits, wear HATs, or even transform into a retro Game Boy.

But if two ways to add peripherals weren’t enough, the Raspberry Pi has now introduced a third interface: PCI Express.

Why do we need a third way to add peripherals? Although USB is great for universality and GPIO is great for custom electronics, the PCIe interface allows you to add devices that require higher bandwidth. In other words, faster and more powerful capabilities.

Which Raspberry Pi Models Have PCIe?

Some of you who started with an older Raspberry Pi board, like I did, might be wondering: “Wait, does the Raspberry Pi have a PCIe slot?”

The answer is yes, the newer boards have access to PCIe. Although the Raspberry Pi 4 used PCIe internally, there was no external connector, so you couldn’t add stuff yet. This all changed with the Raspberry Pi 5 and its RP1 controller, which led to adding an external PCIe interface.

The Raspberry Pi 5 is the first mainline board to have an exposed PCIe connector.
Here’s a table summarizing which Raspberry Pi models have a usable PCIe interface:

Board	PCIe Interface
Raspberry Pi 5	– PCIe slot on board. – PCIe Gen2 x 1 lane.
Compute Module 5	– Requires a separate carrier board for PCIe. – PCIe Gen2 x 1 lane.
Compute Module 4	– Requires a separate carrier board for PCIe. – PCIe Gen2 x 1 lane.

The PCIe slot on the Raspberry Pi 5 unlocks the possibility to connect more powerful expansion cards, even ones that weren’t made specifically for the Raspberry Pi.

What Do I Need to Use PCIe on Raspberry Pi?

To take advantage of PCIe on the Raspberry Pi, you only need 3 pieces of hardware:

• A Raspberry Pi board with a PCIe interface (e.g., Raspberry Pi 5).
• A PCIe adapter.
• A compatible PCIe peripheral device.

So you need a device and a way to connect it to the Pi. There are two common options for the PCIe adapter.

The first way to connect is via a PCIe ribbon cable. If you’re adding something that was made specifically for the Raspberry Pi 5, like the Raspberry Pi AI Kit. It should come with a PCIe ribbon cable that slides directly into the Pi 5’s PCIe slot.

The second way to connect is via a PCIe-to-M.2 adapter. For example, putting the official M.2 HAT on your Raspberry Pi 5 gives it an M.2 slot that’s commonly found on PC motherboards. This is the most common solution to use an expansion card that was originally intended for a PC.

Oh, one last important thing: unlike USB devices, which are plug-and-play, to use a PCIe card, you’ll often need to install Linux firmware (AKA, drivers) for that particular device.

Some devices (like SSDs) won’t need drivers at all. Others may be as easy as installing a package from your system’s default repo. Lastly, some devices require downloading and configuring drivers manually.

Note: Not all expansion cards will work on Raspberry Pi. The best compatibility list that I know of is the Raspberry Pi PCIe database. It lets you see which devices have been confirmed to work and which ones are still being tested.

Use Case Examples for PCIe Devices on Raspberry Pi

Now that you understand how to add PCIe devices to a Raspberry Pi, what can you do with it?

The sky’s the limit, since this feature is still new, but let’s discuss what’s possible. Some of the use cases below are common ways to dramatically improve the Pi’s functionality, while others are interesting niche uses that you may not have realized were possible.

Lightning-Fast NVMe SSD

The Raspberry Pi uses an SD card for storage by default, and if you’ve ever read up on our benchmarks, you’ll know that most cap out at around 100 MB/s, if you’re lucky.

Now that we have PCIe, however, you can use an NVMe SSD instead and get significantly faster transfer speeds. In my experience testing them out myself, an NVMe SSD on the Raspberry Pi 5 will let you hit speeds 4x to 8x faster than an SD card.

To add an NVMe SSD, you need to use an M.2 HAT or a Pi case that adds NVMe capability.

With improved responsiveness from an NVMe SSD, the Raspberry Pi 5 is much more viable as a portable desktop. And it also means faster database servers, game servers, and virtual machines, all of which might not have been practical before.

Related Projects:

• How to Use an NVMe SSD on Raspberry Pi
• Can a Raspberry Pi 5 Replace Your Main PC? I Tested It!
• Minecraft Server on Raspberry Pi
• Which Database Is Best For Raspberry Pi? (My Top 5)
• Getting Started with Proxmox on Raspberry Pi (Virtualization Server)

External Graphics Card

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0z09Ddr58w

OK, this one’s more on the ‘What if?’ side of things. It’s a janky setup, but you can connect a powerful GPU normally meant for PCs (like this RX 7600) to your Raspberry Pi. With this extra graphical horsepower, you can use it to play games in HD with Steam, create 3D models, or use it for LLM projects.

Don’t forget that you’ll need extra connectors, like an M.2-to-OCuLink port adapter, to hook everything together. You’ll also need a separate power supply for the GPU to get enough juice.

Truthfully, I’m not exactly sure what project you have in mind that would best be solved by adding a giant GPU to your tiny Pi. Either way, it’s fun to know that it’s possible and has already been confirmed to work with some graphics cards out there.

Related Projects:

• How to Run Blender on Raspberry Pi: A Complete Tutorial
• 9 Epic Raspberry Pi 5 Projects That Weren’t Possible Before
• How To Play Steam Games on Raspberry Pi
• Playing Quake3 on a Raspberry Pi

High-Bandwidth Network Cards

The Wi-Fi speed on a Raspberry Pi 5 is decent, but it’s not exactly cutting-edge tech. Maybe you need something with higher throughput, perhaps for gathering lots of data from different sensors for edge computing or running an access point for a drone. In these cases, speed is king.

Did you know that you can add a better network card? The ones on a PC are added via PCIe expansion slots, and the Raspberry Pi works similarly. By attaching a PCIe network HAT, you can upgrade to 2.5 Gbps Ethernet (like this one) or Wi-Fi 7 (like this one).

To hit these speeds, you must also have a high-powered network router that supports these technologies. Be aware that the Raspberry Pi 5 will probably cap out at around 2 Gbps. But hey, that demolishes the 200 Mbps real-world speeds I was getting from my Pi 5.

Related Projects:

• How to Monitor Internet Speed on Raspberry Pi
• Turn Your Raspberry Pi into an Access Point
• How to use Raspberry Pi as a Wireless Router with Firewall
• Getting Started With InfluxDB on Raspberry Pi

PBX Phone System

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0184QT2URA

This one’s more for the entrepreneurs among you. Let’s say you need a powerful phone system for your organization, like the kind you’d find in a big corporate office. But you don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on telephony hardware or have giant utility bills for multiple landlines.

With some know-how and a Raspberry Pi, you can combine traditional phones with voice-over-IP technology. VoIP uses the Internet to make and receive calls, and you can use VoIP with just software. But if you add a PBX expansion card (like this one) to a Raspberry Pi, you can route calls through traditional phone handsets. So you can have the convenience of physical phones for an office with many people, but with the low cost of VoIP.

I’ll have to file this one as another ‘What if’ type of project. Although I’ve used a device like this before, I haven’t tested it on the Raspberry Pi myself. And I haven’t seen other guides that have confirmed the compatibility yet. That being said, this project should theoretically be workable, considering that we’re already able to run Asterisk (PBX software) to manage calls from a Raspberry Pi.

Related Projects:

• How to Install Asterisk on a Raspberry Pi?
• 5 Ways Raspberry Pi Can Save Your Company Money!

Want even more ideas? I put together a free resource with over 75 Raspberry Pi project ideas, each with a quick description, tutorial link, and hardware requirements. Whether you’re just starting out or looking for something to do this weekend, this list will keep you busy for a while. Just click here to get instant access.

Audio Applications

If you’re an audiophile who wants high-fidelity playback with a Raspberry Pi, you’re going to want to add a sound card. For compatibility, it’s probably easiest to add something like a HiFiBerry DAC. These work across many Raspberry Pi models because they connect via GPIO.

But for more complex use cases, it may be possible to use PCIe audio expansion cards with a Raspberry Pi. For example, maybe you want to add a full-sized sound card (like a Creative Sound Blaster) and build an audio streamer device that works like the Wiim Pro. For the overly ambitious, you can make your own mini-DSP device for room correction.

Alas, we’re in uncharted territory here. Few PCIe audio cards have been tested by others on Raspberry Pi as of this writing, so you might be the first to let the rest of us know how it goes!

Related Projects:

• Does the Raspberry Pi Have a Speaker? (Audio Configuration)
• How to Install MoOde on Raspberry Pi (Beginner’s Guide)
• Getting Started With Volumio On Raspberry Pi (Media Player)
• The 3 Best Ways to Use Spotify on Your Raspberry Pi

TV & Video Capture Equipment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KezoN9tu6_Y

I decided to group these expansion cards because they’re somewhat similar: they capture live video from other sources and send it to your Raspberry Pi.

First up is watching live TV. If you’re in a country that doesn’t support the Raspberry Pi TV HAT or you want something more powerful, try adding a PCIe TV tuner card. It lets you connect an antenna or cable TV to your Pi. With the right setup, you can stream live TV to any device in your home, including phones/tablets, and even record channels like a DVR device.

Next up is streaming other types of video. Using a video capture card, you can pass through live video from a different device to your Raspberry Pi. For instance, you can stream gameplay from your Nintendo Switch or pipe a camera feed to livestream events.

Before you rush out to buy any of these cards, find out if there’s driver support on Linux first.

Related Projects:

• How to Install OBS Studio on Raspberry Pi OS? (Video Capture)
• The Ultimate Guide to Install Kodi on Raspberry Pi (OSMC)
• How to Set Up the Raspberry Pi TV HAT: A Step-by-Step Guide

Server Mass Storage

If high-speed storage isn’t your main concern but rather adding more storage in a small footprint, that’s possible with PCIe on Raspberry Pi. Mass storage is useful for those running servers like a self-hosted media center or a torrent seedbox.

By adding a SATA controller to your Raspberry Pi, you can hook up many HDDs or SSDs and still maintain decent speeds. Now you can turn the Raspberry Pi into a NAS or even run RAID if you need data redundancy.

Related Projects:

• Raspberry Pi as a Media Center
• Turn Your Raspberry Pi Into A Torrent Box.
• Pi NAS: A Guide to Build Your Own Budget-Friendly NAS
• Set Up RAID on Raspberry Pi: Step-by-Step Guide

AI or ML Accelerators

Sure, you can run artificial intelligence or machine learning projects on a barebones Raspberry Pi, but it’ll be slow and inefficient. What’s a better solution? Adding a hardware accelerator to your Raspberry Pi.

For instance, connecting a Raspberry Pi AI Kit will let you take on AI / ML projects with hardware that’s specialized for crushing these workloads.

There are other accelerators compatible with the Raspberry Pi 5, too, like the Coral M.2 Accelerator. But as of this writing, the Raspberry Pi AI Kit has the highest performance at 13 TOPS.

Related Projects:

• 5 Easy AI Projects on Raspberry Pi for Beginners
• What is a Raspberry Pi AI Kit? Everything You Need to Know
• TensorFlow and AI on Raspberry Pi: A Beginner’s Guide
• How to Install NumPy on Raspberry Pi & Create a Simple Project

The PCIe interface on the Raspberry Pi 5 is still a relatively new area to explore, but it has opened up brand new possibilities. I can’t wait to see what big projects you all come up with next for this tiny Raspberry Pi.

Whenever you’re ready, here are other ways I can help you:

Test Your Raspberry Pi Level (Free): Not sure why everything takes so long on your Raspberry Pi? Take this free 3-minute assessment and see what’s causing the problems.

The RaspberryTips Community: Need help or want to discuss your Raspberry Pi projects with others who actually get it? Join the RaspberryTips Community and get access to private forums, exclusive lessons, and direct help.

Master your Raspberry Pi in 30 days: If you are looking for the best tips to become an expert on Raspberry Pi, this book is for you. Learn useful Linux skills and practice multiple projects with step-by-step guides.

Master Python on Raspberry Pi: Create, understand, and improve any Python script for your Raspberry Pi. Learn the essentials step-by-step without losing time understanding useless concepts.

You can also find all my recommendations for tools and hardware on this page.