Raspberry Pi 4B has been released recently, and it’s the first such device that might actually be usable as a general-purpose desktop PC.
I don’t know yet what the Geekbench score is, but it has 4GB RAM, can drive two 4K monitors, is 2+ times faster than the 3B+ model, has gigabit Ethernet and USB3, essentially making it an ideal cheap and secure device for running general purpose office/school applications.
I ordered one and will report how it does running Linux desktop and my typical workload. In theory, it’s the first one that actually has enough power to rival a NUC for lightweight HTPC and desktop tasks.
Update after receiving and briefly testing the 4GB unit:
Geekbench 2 (ARM build) is 4830. The score of the 3B+ is 2266.
Subjective speed is comparable to my media player, Core2Duo E6500@2900MHz, which means it’s quite usable, since that used to be my desktop machine; the speed is not up to today’s standards, but it’s not stone age. I’m using it to write this article and the speed is fine, it’s a normal desktop computer.
kde-plasma-desktop package in raspbian made a mess, and is unusable, so I’m using the default raspbian window manager. Raspbian is incredibly breakable; after attempting to install multiple window managers, everything broke in many different ways, for instance raspi-config fails to set a valid boot to GUI or boot to CLI configuration; it just does whatever, and when I startx, it complately bypasses lightdm/sddm and opens whatever (at first Raspbian default GUI, but later Mate desktop, without the ability to switch between the two. It’s simply not ready for “normies”. Window manager switching should either not work at all, or work well, without conflicting daemons/applets, and reliably selectable through either GUI or CLI. I can’t believe I have to even say this.
The video works marginally OK when I use the legacy open-gl driver in raspi-config. 720p video works ok, only 9 dropped frames of 2800. Everything above 720p is not smooth. The mouse moves better now too.
Mate desktop is much, much better than the default Raspbian GUI. Normal things such as the volume buttons actually work. This machine should have Ubuntu Mate as the desktop OS, and Raspbian should be left for tinkering with hardware and emergency use only. Mate desktop, however, is good enough for normal desktop use. For instance, I couldn’t make Raspbian GUI make my mouse work non-sluggish; in mate-desktop-environment it just works. That also goes for the volume control buttons on both keyboards I tested. I could get used to this.
It’s prone to overheating. I got a high temperature icon repeatedly while working at the Raspbian desktop while performing apt-get install of a large dependency tree. The temps were above 80°C with alu heatsink glued to the CPU but plastic top of the case closed. I opened it now and the temps while just typing this are 66°C.
I plugged the USB3 powered hub from the desktop to the Pi and it just worked, plug&play, with all the devices.
There’s some super-weird shit going on with overheating. For instance, I forgot a Kingston USB drive in the device, and when I wanted to remove it, it was hot, like, incredibly hot. I can’t remember whether that was the case with 3B+ but this isn’t normal, since the drive was idling, and not copying the universe.
The CPU temperature is now 62-66°C, which is about ten degrees more than 3B+ in similar workloads. This CPU needs stronger cooling, and that’s normal since it has the power of an E6500 which has a regular PC heatsink with a fan, and this has a small passive heatsink.
The video drivers are generally the weakest spot of the OS so far, from what I can tell. All kinds of artifacting is going on while video is playing; mouse pointer hiding and showing, browser randomly redrawing, that kind of crap. It’s alpha release. I don’t think the hardware acceleration is turned on at all. There needs to be a Raspbian update having the 4B in mind, because from what I recall 3B+ actually has better YouTube video.
To repeat myself, there needs to be an OS fork for Pi devices: one for tinkering with hardware, for which Raspbian is great, and one for desktop use, for classrooms or similar, and that one needs to be polished. Ubuntu-Mate seems like an awesome candidate, although I would also like to see kde-plasma-desktop working.
I am testing it on a 4K 43″ monitor, with a mechanical keyboard and Logitech G602 wireless mouse plugged into a powered USB3 hub, and it’s a very comfortable desktop experience, until I get an idea of playing video. That part just doesn’t work well and needs to be fixed in a Raspbian update. This hub also provides the power for the Pi; I also tried a 45W USB-C Asus laptop brick, and Apple iPad brick. The iPad brick was the only one not providing enough power; I had constant undervolt notifications and at one point device actually crashed during a power peak when starting Mate. Have this in mind; this requires a netbook-level power brick, not a phone or tablet-level one. This is not your old Raspberry Pi that could run from a computer’s USB socket and be fine. The power demands are still nowhere near any kind of a x86 desktop computer, but it matches the small and frugal laptops. The overheating has apparently been resolved once I removed the top cover on the case. It would actually make good use of a slow case fan blowing on it, but a high-RPM small fan would be terribly counterproductive. The solution I would prefer would be this:
Aluminium case design where the entire top part of the case is a heatsink would be quite appropriate for a machine of this power, because if you close it inside an un-ventilated plastic enclosure it will melt itself to death, and if it’s left open it can be damaged in all sorts of ways in a classroom environment. Essentially, I’d install it in a VESA mounted enclosure with a large heatsink, and either extend the GPIO with a flat cable to some accessible spot on the monitor stand, or just forget about GPIO for desktop use; have a 4B model for driving a desktop environment, for coding and web/office stuff, and one small, cheap A-type unit for driving sensors and robotics. You’ll do the development/deployment/testing over a ssh connection in any case, it’s just a matter whether you do the development on a “proper” desktop PC, or a desktop-level Pi. As far as I’m concerned, 4B needs a software update that will fix its video problems, and make a mate-desktop-environment a default option in Raspbian: well tested, polished and not conflicting with the unnecessary LXDE and whatever GUI that used to make sense on the older generations. This one needs a choice between Mate, XFCE and KDE, not between SHIT and CRAP. Yes, this is high praise coming from me, and means the device itself is quite excellent for the intended purpose. With proper cooling, properly implemented video codecs and some OS polishing, this could be the ideal classroom computer: cheap, small, integrated into the monitor for robustness, and fast enough to run everything kids would need to learn. And it’s cheap enough you can equip classrooms with it even in the financially not so well off schools that can’t afford i3 or i5 desktops. So, thumbs up, but with a caveat regarding the OS which is obviously an alpha-release considering the needs of this device. I can hardly wait for Ubuntu Mate to be compiled and tweaked for 4B.
OK, I’m testing it now.
Geekbench 2 (ARM build) is 4830. The score of the 3B+ is 2266.
Subjective speed is comparable to my media player, Core2Duo E6500@2900MHz, which means it’s quite usable, since that used to be my desktop machine; the speed is not up to today’s standards, but it’s not stone age.
kde-plasma-desktop package in raspbian made a mess, and is unusable, so I’m using the default raspbian window manager. Will try xfce4.
YouTube video works worse than anything I’ve ever tried, including IBM T43. The framerate is in the order of magnitude of 5FPS or less. The problem is, it’s like that on every resolution, including 240p, which makes me think the hardware codecs are not used by the OS at all. So far that and the kde-plasma-desktop not working are the only serious issues, but they are kind of big ones. Not having youtube video is basically as bad as it gets for any device I ever tested. They need to fix this.
The video works better when I use the legacy open-gl driver in raspi-config. Now 720p video works ok, only 9 dropped frames of 2800. The mouse moves better now too.
Volume control keys don’t work.
Yea, they rushed the hardware, no doubt.
Raspbian simply isn’t ready.
But overheating is not Raspbian problem, it’s hardware problem.
It could be better when GPU will work properly, but who knows how much better – depending on GPU thermals.
I am ok with putting passive sink – which will require open case as you said, but I am NOT ok with small, high rpm fans – I’m done with those for this lifetime.
I think I will wait a bit, let them sort drivers first.
GPU would not matter that much for my desired application, but I don’t want to put a server on something that throttles as soon as CPU spikes a bit.
The question is – would CPU throttle if GPU would do its job properly.
There’s some super-weird shit going on. For instance, I forgot a Kingston USB drive in the device, and when I wanted to remove it, it was *hot*, like, incredibly hot. I can’t remember whether that was the case with 3B+ but this isn’t normal, since the drive was idling, and not copying the universe.
The CPU temperature is now 62-66C, which is about ten degrees more than 3B+ in similar workloads. This CPU needs stronger cooling, and that’s normal since it has the power of an E6500 which has a regular PC heatsink with a fan, and this has a small passive alu heatsink.
The video drivers are generally the weakest spot of the OS so far, from what I can tell. All kinds of artifacting is going on while video is playing; mouse pointer hiding and showing, browser randomly redrawing, that kind of crap. It’s alpha release. I hope they don’t sell this to schools because the kids are going to have a fit.
It’s prone to overheating. I got a high temperature icon repeatedly while working at the Raspbian desktop while performing apt-get install of a large dependency tree. The temps were above 80C with alu heatsink glued to the CPU but plastic top of the case closed. I opened it now and the temps while just typing this are 66C.
I plugged the USB3 powered hub from the desktop to the Pi and it just worked, plug&play, with all the devices. The wireless mouse is not smooth, unlike normal x86 Linux desktop, where it works great. That has to be a window manager issue.
It arrived, but it’s defective; it doesn’t boot from the SD card that I took from the working 3B+. To be sure, I took another card, from Mihael’s unit, and that one doesn’t boot either. Both cards work perfectly in 3B+ devices, so it’s obvious the new one is at fault. Now I’m trying to clone the entire partition tree from the working SD cart to an SSD, and will try to boot the 4B from USB. If *that* doesn’t work, then that’s that I’m afraid.
The SSD does partially boot on the old Pi, but I had to run the recovery process which reinstalls Raspbian; something in my “partition copy-paste” method wasn’t quite to its liking. Well, the fact that I can boot it from USB SSD at all is good. Now I can test for a possible SD card slot error on the 4B.
… and no, it won’t boot from the USB, tried all 4 ports. It’s a dud.
That’s just bad.
Bad luck I guess?
But I wouldn’t be surprised at all they sent a bad or test unit just to send something with hopes they will replace it when you complaint.
I guess. It seems to be that kind of a day today.
Same thing if you try with fresh installation of Raspbian on SD card?
You are right, and I feel stupid. I found some 2GB microSD, formatted, downloaded the network version of NOOBS that’s small enough to fit there, and it booted.
Still staring at the screen incredulously. 🙂
It looks that good on 4k? 😀
No, 2GB only got me to the noobs image select screen. 🙂 I’m going out to buy a bigger card, and a heatsink while I’m at it.
I didn’t try that because I didn’t have an SD card I could format, but I tried a SSD version of the trick that works fine on 3B+ and that didn’t work either. Also tried several power sources, to no avail. It’s not a brick, it makes LED flashing signs but doesn’t boot from anything. But yes, buying a fresh card and downloading the latest NOOBS is something I hadn’t tried.
There are reports that it throttles a lot and can’t play 4K video among others, but … to be honest … I got utterly sick of internet reviews and they proved to be completely misleading in several last purchases I made.
They are either paid articles or emotional rampage or out of context, misleading bullshit. Or all of the above.
So, I can’t wait for your review and then do one of my own for my specific needs. Prices makes easy testing in this case.
Btw, where did you ordered it from?
I ordered from http://www.hr.galagomarket.com/, Slovenia. They supposedly send stuff the same or next day but I haven’t heard from them yet, so I can’t really recommend them.
Yea, 4GB is not available any more, it seems they took more orders than they had them on stock, causing delays.
I’m not really a fan of that happening. At least they should have sent a notification to people like myself who placed an order which will now obviously be delayed.
The status changed to “dispatched”, so, that’s good.
Regarding the 4k video playback, I actually don’t expect the 4B to be able to do it, it’s enough that it can drive a 4K monitor on native res. I would expect the video playback on that resolution to be possible only if it utilizes the built-in hardware codec, but if a video in question uses something different, it will play at 0.5 FPS or something. 🙂 My experience with 4K monitors is that Intel built-in GPU doesn’t really shine on those, and I expect it to be more powerful than what 4B has. So, let’s not have unrealistic expectations there. If the device matches a Geekbench 5000 Intel PC with onboard graphics at 4K@60, I’ll be amazed.
They did build it to run H.265 4K on 60FPS using hardware decoding, but it seems they were too quick with hardware since Raspbian isn’t ready and if Raspbian isn’t utilising that hardware, nothing else will.
But as long hardware is there, I have no problem waiting for software and upgrade turning Raspi 4 into really capable media player basically replacing my Apple TV 4K (since I don’t care about Apple movie services and even if I did – they’ll be available in Croatia right after Elon builds F1 track on Mars).
One thing that interest me – how much would passive heat-sink help Raspi 4 with throttling – and that’s only IF throttling is actually an issue in real-life usage, which I highly doubt.
Most people use the devices in the regimen of short CPU peaks followed by the long CPU idles, basically load the application quickly, then work in it, then do some CPU demanding process, then idle again. Very few things require a sustained load, foremost being gaming, video rendering and 3d. Basically, the closest a normal person will come to a process that’s pegging the CPU at 100% at prolonged periods is a Flash game, and that’s because Flash is crap.
So, essentially, if it loads applications and switches between them quickly, you recognize it as fast. The stuff that takes a while is just a number and mostly doesn’t matter – whether a video renders for 10 or 15 minutes doesn’t matter much, you leave the computer and go make yourself coffee in either case, and check on it here and there.
As I thought:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVfyTd3YDL8
It supports 4K display, but not 4K video codec, which is logical since this would require them to have a seriously powerful GPU, about 4x power increase from the 1080p requirements.
What I would actually like is for someone to finally make a mini-itx PC motherboard with a powerful ARM CPU, normal RAM slots, m.2 and SATA, pci-e slots for GPU and other stuff, basically something you can use as a drop-in replacement for standard PC motherboards. Normally priced, of course; it could be cheaper than similar Atom J1900 boards.
From raspberry official spec:
H.265 (4kp60 decode), H264 (1080p60 decode, 1080p30 encode)
It does have hardware to decode h.265 4k60p, but Raspbian is not utilizing it currently and is using software decoding instead which obviously does not work.
They rushed hardware without proper software support.
Well, it’s nice to know it has the capability, although, realistically, that kind of workload is a bit above its pay grade. 🙂
Hello, this comment is a bit unrelated but as I was searching about ARM CPUs, I came across this bit of news:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/20/18693136/apple-recall-2015-15-inch-macbook-pro-battery-overheat-fire-risk-safety
If I remember in a previous article you showed a 15 inch macbook pro in a picture, so I thought I should just let you know about this issue of potential overheating battery issues with the macbook pro.
By the way is it fine if some time in the near future I ask you about some advice and insight regarding spiritual questions/issues through email?
If not then that fine and I won’t bother you.
I know about that; fortunately my serial number is outside the affected range.
As a rule, I don’t answer personal questions of that kind. If it’s not something you can ask by commenting an article, then you can be quite sure I’ll consider it too personal to answer.