The Most Interesting Quirks of the Raspberry Pi 4
Finally, there was a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, the device for $ 35, which incorporates a variety of useful technologies on a single printed circuit board, which you can hold in your hand. It could even be your next budget computer if you can live with some of the tradeoffs that enthusiasts identified in their early benchmarks.
This tiny tool, which powers a lot of smart hacking projects, including dorm parties , has received many great updates for its fourth generation version. On paper, the specs are impressive: a quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 processor clocked at 1.5 GHz; up to 4 GB of memory (price climbed to $ 55); Gigabit Ethernet; wireless-ac; and the ability to stream 60fps to a 4K display (or 30fps to two connected 4K displays).
This is all well and good on paper, but what does this change actually mean? Here’s what we know so far:
He’s warming up
If you’ve played with your Raspberry Pi before – especially if you’ve been trying to get the best performance out of it – you’ve probably run into some overheating issues . The Raspberry Pi 4 is no different; actually hotter. As Gareth Halfakry writes for Medium :
“… after just a few minutes, the entire board is warm to the touch. Start loading it heavily and this heat will become uncomfortable; while it is still perfectly possible to use the board without additional cooling, those looking to fit it into a case will find that active cooling is required to avoid thermal throttling. “
He snapped some excellent thermal images of the Raspberry Pi 4 and its 2018 predecessor, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B +, which we have posted below. Watch where you put your fingers.
It sucks more power
This is a no brainer. The Raspberry Pi 4 switched to USB-C for power – a necessity as it now draws about 3.5W in standby and up to 7.6W or so when under duress . The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B +, in comparison, draws about 1.9 watts on standby and up to about 5 watts when you tax it .
Good news? Even though it runs at top speed 24 hours a day, every day of the year, the Raspberry Pi 4 should only cost you about $ 3 extra to run.
It can work with a 4K display, but …
One of the most compelling features of the Raspberry Pi 4 is its dual HDMI configuration, which, as mentioned, supports 60fps on a 4K display, or 30fps on two 4K displays.
It’s just mind blowing to me to think that a tiny single board computer can handle 16.5 million pixels like that, but don’t let that spec fool you. The Raspberry Pi 4 can handle a 4K display, but that doesn’t mean it can play 4K videos or even 1080p videos very well. From Abram Pilt of Tom’s Hardware :
“When you’re surfing the internet, viewing still images and just enjoying the extra 4K screen real estate, that’s great, but video playback is the Raspberry Pi 4’s Achilles heel, at least as of this writing. Whether we tried streaming 4K video or using a downloaded file, we never had a smooth, workable 4K experience, either in Raspbian Buster or LibreElec, the OS that Kodi’s media player is running on. Some H.264 encoded videos, including Tears of Steel, did not play at all or displayed as a bunch of colors. Even the jellyfish video samples that the Kodi folks recommended for my testing looked like still images with no movement. Obviously, there is still a lot of optimization to be done on both the OS and software side so that the Raspberry Pi 4 can play 4K video.
Sadly, even 1080p YouTube video streaming is a problem at the moment. The Stranger Things full-screen trailer, launched at 1080p, showed clear jerks. However, when viewing the same clip in a smaller window, playback was smooth. The same problem occurred even when I reduced the resolution of the stream to 480p.
1080p offline video playback works fine if the screen resolution is 1920 x 1080 or lower. The downloaded trailer for Avenger’s Endgame was perfectly smooth when I watched it with the VLC player. “
How well does the Raspberry Pi 4 handle common tasks?
It is useful to run a ton of synthetic tests to compare devices, but it is difficult to convert these kinds of ratings into what might be like using a device for everyday tasks: video encoding, image manipulation, web browsing, etc.
In addition to these thermal tests done earlier, Halfacree also ran the Raspberry Pi 4 in real-world conditions to give you a better idea of what it’s actually like to use (and give context for upgrades to its hardware).
While he didn’t list the size of the file he was working with, which I’d be interested to know, he did a quick file compression test and compared the Raspberry 4 to any other existing Raspberry Pi version (if I’m correct). As you might expect, the latest and greatest single board computer version smokes its predecessors:
When Halfacree put the Raspberry Pi 4 through an image-editing test, the exact kind of actions you could perform on your tiny PC for $ 35-55, the performance improvement wasn’t nearly as significant . What his testing says more – if you know your Raspberry Pi specs – is how much performance gain you get if you plug enough memory into the device, at least if you plan on working with high-res files. …
While the 1GB version of the Raspberry Pi 4 is still robust compared to older versions of the Raspberry Pi, you can also go for more and spend on the 4GB version if you’re going to keep that device for a while. Piltch writes: “It never hurts to have a little extra memory to work with, especially if you want to launch multiple browser tabs at once”:
“Without taking my eyes off the Gnome System Monitor, I noticed that even with one or two tabs open, I was using over 1GB of RAM. However, on a Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM, I had no problem launching more than 15 tabs at the same time and switching between them. “
The 4GB boost also helps the Raspberry Pi 4 Crush Speedometer 2.0 , a synthetic benchmark that mimics the responsiveness of web applications (in other words, what kind of experience you might have with sites like Google Docs).
How Raspberry Pi 4 Solves Previous Pi Issues
Another interesting tidbit I caught when testing Halfacree was that the Raspberry Pi 4 fixed some annoying issues that were slowing down the performance of components that should have been much faster on previous Raspberry Pi computers. Case in point: Gigabit Ethernet.
Although the Raspberry Pi got a Gigabit Ethernet connection with the launch of the Raspberry Pi 3 B +, its performance was limited by the design of the device ( shared Ethernet / USB bus ). This has been fixed on the Raspberry Pi 4 as Halfacree measured maximum Ethernet bandwidth from 943 Mbps to just 237 Mbps on the Raspberry Pi 3 B +.
Likewise, the USB speed on the Raspberry Pi 4 has increased significantly thanks to the removal of the aforementioned USB bottleneck and the upgrade of the slower USB 2.0 ports to USB 3.0. Now that the Raspberry Pi 4 can let USB 3.0 shine, it does – at least when Halfacree plugged in an SSD and ran some read and write tests.