untitled design

A huge AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card was connected to a miniature single-board Raspberry Pi 4

An enthusiast named Jeff Geerling, who produces some rather interesting videos on the Raspberry Pi, this time decided to conduct a very unusual experiment, connecting a full-fledged AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card to a rather compact single-board computer Raspberry Pi 4 via the PCI-E line. Naturally, this makes sense solely for experiment, since in fact the processor built into the board will not be able to fully reveal the computing power of this video card – this is about the same as putting a powerful V8 engine from a racing supercar on a lawn mower.

In addition, it should be noted right away that the enthusiast used not an ordinary Raspberry Pi 4 board for assembling, but a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 IO Board, since in this case the board has a PCI-E x1 port – the original model does not have this port. Unfortunately, just taking and plugging a video card into the board will not work either – for this you need to use a special adapter from PCI-E x16 to PCI-E x1. However, the difficulties do not end there, since a powerful video card still needs to be powered – if the Raspberry Pi 4 consumes only 5-10 W, then the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT requires 230 W to work. Jeff solved this problem by connecting the video card to an external ATX-format power supply, which is used to power the discrete graphics.

It turned out that the operating system really detects the video card and correctly detects the BAR (base address register), but when compiling the AMD driver for this system, the user encountered an error. Actually, for this reason, Jeff will not be able to get a fully assembled kernel for full-fledged work with a video card, but he promised to solve this problem in the future – the development of the enthusiast can be tracked on the GitHub branch, where the enthusiast will publish every step of his experiments.

You may also like

Get the latest

Stay Informed: Get the Latest Updates and Insights

 

Most popular