this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2026
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Honest question, what are people using their 16GB RPis for? What are you running that needs that much RAM?
I got a rock-5-itx in the before times with a decadent 32GB of RAM. It's my home server, and it's currently using 19/31GB:
The headroom is nice, I guess. Sometimes I spin up whole desktop dev environments I can access remotely.
For Halloween I used an orangepi (cause of cost, but would not recommend due to support) to install an LCD eye in a skeleton that tracks people using a object detection model. Additionally it's setup with some voice commands/interactions.
Overall that means holding 3+ ML models in ram (yolo, whisper, Vad, etc.). That basically uses up all the RAM I have and before optimizations was actually causing the chip to overheat (was able to fix that, but still hits the cpu pretty hard).
I installed SteamLink on it and use it to stream my gaming PC to my living room, which is too far away for an HDMI cord. I can get 1440p @ 120fps with no issues.
Surely simple streaming doesn't require much RAM at all. That was my point, for most people's use cases, the 4GB or 8GB variants should be more than enough.
If it were just videos, then sure. But games require a little more. Maybe 16gb is a bit more than what's needed, but it's the unit I have.
Two things I’ve found that really help having more ram for on the pi’s:
I guess that makes sense. Personally I don't see SBCs as very good Docker hosts or build machines. Aren't build times and such affected much more by the weak CPU? Obviously if the system starts swapping, then sure, having more RAM to avoid that helps a lot.
The following has been my own experience:
On a pi, you’re much more likely to run out of memory than cpu compute. The increased memory gives you more concurrent things to run…images etc.
Back when I got them and they were just north of a 100 bucks it made a lot of sense. Not so much with current prices.
Having them tho, I really enjoy using them with poe. Their idle power draw is very low. Which is great for budget homelabs. But if I was looking for hardware today I’d look for used nucs.
Been on a NUC for years and if this thing finally shits the bed I'll be on eBay hunting another one. Neat thing with NUCs is you can pick your price point and get a unit from $<100-$3,000.
I suppose it would be good for a large number of mostly idle services. Nextcloud, home assistant, a few other containers. Things that don't do much except for brief periods, but still need to be running. Add in a zfs or btrfs filesystem and some of those operations will use a lot of ram.
I certainty wouldn't go that route, I've found that 2-4GB in an SBC more than meets the purposes I use them for. I also don't think I'm willing to run off a microsd anymore now that I've discovered emmc and ufs boards.