 If you head out to a restaurant and order a $35 dessert, you might expect the waiter to bring you more than just a plain slice of raspberry pie. But getting this raspberry pie for the same price might just end up to be a fantastic deal. A printed circuit board might not taste as good as a piece of sweet pastry, but these little guys are a heck of a lot more versatile. With people using raspberry pies as the basis of projects that run the gamut from home security and automation to robotics and even beer making. When I found out the raspberry pi 2 had been released, I had to put it into action myself. Welcome to my review of the raspberry pi 2 model B. Intel's new 750 series SSDs utilize the NVMe standard, providing speeds never seen before on a consumer series storage drive. Click now to learn more. Probably the most striking feature of the raspberry pi 2 is how much stuff they managed to cram onto a PCB the size of a credit card. You get an SoC, also known as system on chip, that features a 900 megahertz CPU and a 250 megahertz GPU, one gigabyte of DDR2 ram on the back of the board and four USB 2.0 ports and a full-size HDMI port that supports audio, a 3.5 millimeter stereo jack that actually supports video out through an adapter if you're hooking up to an older TV, 10 100 ethernet, a micro SD slot for storage, and a micro USB port that powers the whole thing. You don't get a power cord, but a USB wall wart that supports one amp of current should work fine for most users. I used a standard one amp phone charger and had no problems, although you might want to look into getting something like a charger rated for two amps if you're pumping a lot of juice through those USB ports. There's also a couple bits you won't find on your standard desktop motherboard. The pi includes connectors for an optional mini LCD display like you'd see on a digital camera like we're kind of filming on now and the optional $25 separately sold raspberry pi camera module which allows you to record 1080p video. But probably the most important feature for those of you who really want to dive into a special project is the 40 pin general purpose input slash output usually just called GPIO. These pins are fully programmable and allow you to control tons of different things with the pi such as thermometers for portable weather stations, motors for miniature tanks and RC vehicles, and maybe even a wireless door lock, etc. But before I dove in and tried to turn the pi into something uber cool, something on the spec list caught my attention. The CPU on the raspberry pi is actually the same CPU, an ARM Cortex A7, that's in the Samsung Galaxy S5 mini just at a lower clock speed. With how we use smartphones for lots of basic tasks like watching YouTube videos, web browsing, and listening to music, I got to wondering could the raspberry pi 2, especially if it has double the ram and quadruple the cpu cores of the previous model, be used as a basic pc? Could this little $35 computer actually replace a desktop that's just being used for stuff like maybe a Facebook machine? I was determined to find out so I went ahead and inserted the micro SD card that was included and pre-loaded with Raspbian, a distribution of db and linux specifically adopted for the raspberry pi. Keep in mind though that if you order a pi it won't come with that micro SD card but you can download Raspbian and load it onto your own card for free. After first displaying a configuration utility with some basic options such as keyboard layout, the pi takes about 20 seconds to boot into the Raspbian desktop which looks a little like macOS from the late 1990s, a gray background, the taskbar at the top. It comes with a simple web browser, console, a pdf reader, a simple text editor, several programming environments, and a stripped down version of Minecraft in case you want to forget about your project for a few minutes and just play with your wood in things. Also a word of warning this is a linux environment and it's a bit of a weird one to boot. It may be a bit of a struggle to work with even if you aren't a linux wizard but I believe in you. You're a skilled and intelligent person and with the help of online resources you can do this. Once you're good to go one of the main things people are going to try to do is use the raspberry pi for gaming outside of just Minecraft and it does quite well if you're looking for a little micro-sized retro gaming platform. There's tons of projects online for people making super small even sometimes mobile retro gaming machines based on the raspberry pi platform and honestly I'm not surprised as it excels in this category. First off this won't really be that good of a pc replacement for people who even just want to use it for gmail and to laugh at some memes. The pi has some issues with certain elements on many modern websites and has a steep learning curve for anyone who doesn't have quite a bit of experience in linux. So who is this product actually for? Well basically anyone who has an idea for a cool project and the patience to see it through by learning how to configure things in linux can make good use of the pi. Plenty of people have gotten their retro gaming consoles completely up and running in a matter of hours and others have even taken it further by building custom cases with joysticks and miniature screens to have a fully functional retro handheld or gaming station. But if you don't want to game there are hundreds and hundreds of other uses for the raspberry pi that are limited basically only by your imagination. Media servers, smart thermostats, and even electric electronic bottle openers have all been powered by the raspberry pi. So if you have 35 bucks burning a hole in your pocket for some reason and you're not in the mood to spend it on dessert it might be worth finding out just what you can come up with. Speaking of desserts our friends over at Massdrop are back with another awesome drop. The Creative Sound Blaster E3 USB DAC slash amp combo which features a built-in mic, a mic in slash dual headphone out combo line in, bluetooth with aptx support, and has 112 decibel signal to noise ratio and it's available over there for another four days or so. Of course this product is available through Massdrop at a significantly discounted price thanks to their group buy model. Essentially the more people buy the more prices goes down for a set minimum and it has already reached its lowest price point which is kind of awesome and it's about 40 US dollars below the general MSRP. You can check out this drop and many others in the link in the description or at dro.ps slash Linus Tech Tips. That link doesn't give us a kickback or anything but it does let them know that we sent you. All right guys what would you do with one of these little tiny machines? I have a few ideas of my own which might make it on to the Linus Tech Tips channel but let me know in the comments down below over on the forum. While you're still here watching this video click like, dislike, favorite, subscribe, share, anything that you really want that's around the screen. Those all actually help us in some way or another and don't forget to comment as well. If you want a shirt that isn't this one but is more Linus Media Group focused you can look in the description of the video. You can also see in the description video a link to buy this little product that's right here. Over on the forum you can see things in the support us link like changing your Amazon affiliate code, installing the forum add-on for your browser which can help you see when you get stuff like notifications or PMs or anything like that and can also automatically change your Amazon affiliate links for you if you enable that from there along with all of our other sponsor links. 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