Trying to save a few bucks can make or break your next Raspberry Pi project.
Brand new, still in the box 2GB Raspberry Pi 5
As with most things, it depends on what you intend to do with it.
I pitted a new 2GB Raspberry Pi against 4GB and 8GB boards. Hardware-wise, apart from the RAM capacity and the fact that the 2GB variant uses the new D0 processor stepping, they are identical.
the 2GB Raspberry Pi 5 has a few differences
At first blush, I didn’t see a lot of difference. All three showed boot times of about 22 seconds, and all three consumed about the same amount of RAM on a cold boot restart — with the 2GB board using the most, at about 630MB, while the 4GB and 8GB boards both hovered around the 570MB mark.
Load times for the various bundled apps were also functionally identical.