#275 Raspberry Pi 4: Test and Weaknesses

The Raspberry P4 is on all channels. Hurrah everywhere. But is this true? What is it suitable for, and is it worth buying one now? Let’s have a closer look. Buckle up; it will not be a nice ride.

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[SmithyScotland]

Dual Hdmi and PoE requirements came from the advertising display markets. The buy huge numbers of Pis.

[nafihahmd]

"Typical feature of us Engineers. We have a solution. Where the hell is the problem that we can solve with it ?! "
😂😂

[timballam]

A VERY large usage of Pis is for advertising screens, being able to drive two is a real positive!

[matthiasklein]

One small addition:The RPi3B+ already had Gigabit Ethernet. But was attached to the USB controller, limiting it's speed to about 300MBit. Now, with the RPi 4 it's directly attached and runs at (almost) full speed.

[merlingallagher]

Thr reason why the RAM is faster is because it's DDR4 not because it's more (bit confusing in the video).
This is also very beneficial for GPU performance since it shares the memory.

[sspence]

in iot applications, the pi is commonly used as a data collector, not a sensor. mysql and apache are greatly improved on this version.

[AnthonyGoodley]

Flowers for your partner has a much greater ROI than a Pi 4. Especially that night.

[cmuller]

The rpi 3b+ already has gigabit. But it's connected with usb 2.0 that's why it cannot do more than 300Mbps. The rpi 3b was 100Mbps. That's why there's a x10 improvement over rpi 3b but only 3x over rpi 3b+

[Giekeme]

Thank you for being the first and only youtuber talking about the application compatibility! Going to wait a while before getting one myself

[gotj]

All my RPis run headless, and they've gifted me another HDMI... thank you very much! LOL

[zaberfreedom]

I would prefer a standard HDMI connector.

[bariole]

This, very technical, video has lot of technical errors.

For example in video RPi3 network is referred as 100 Mbps (wrong) and yet the benchmark table shows 332 Mbps (right).

Benchmark table shows CPU speed regression (definitively wrong), while video calls it 20% improvement (wrong again). For one the table columns are switched. And even then, that cpu benchmark is absurd. It is a very simple number cruncher. And all it measured was linear scaling of performance with cpu frequency increase from 1.2 GHz to 1.5 GHz. In real life A72 in RPi4 is *much* stronger than A53 from RPi3.

[TheSkronk]

Shiny surfaces like on the USB-connectors does not give accurate readings on a thermal camera due to different emissivity than a perfect black body.

[richleyden]

I had come to the same conclusions regarding the Pi 4 but I am still grateful for your well reasoned "contrarian" review. One minor disagreement with you is the switch to USB C power. Most makers would have been happier with a coaxial barrel connector. I've had power issues with all of the Pi's from the very beginning, I usually power through the GPIO header but have accidently destroyed more than one Pi .

[TheBrassn]

The new Raspberry does not support hardware based decoding of Googles VP9 codec and thus the performance on YouTube ist not great and most likely never will be. You can see the supported codecs at 5:20 .
VLC player just needs further work to run smoothly, especially for hardware decoding when playing a supported video.

[MoraFermi]

"Mission critical", OpenMediaVault and rPi?!
I guess we have quite differing views of "mission critical".

[ChristianBrunschen]

At 4:38 and forward you say that the RPi 4 supports gigabit ethernet instead of the "ancient 100Mbit one" and "the potential speed increase of 10 times ends in a factor of three"; but that's quite wrong, and you make it sound like the RPi4 doesn't achieve the full potential here, when it actually does!
Gigabit was introduced with the RPi3B+, but because the ethernet chip was connected via USB2, the throughput was limited to about 330Mbps, as you can also see in the chart; so the RPi3B+ had the "potential speed increase of 10x" and failed to achieve it.
With the improved USB3 support on the RPi4, that bottleneck is gone, and the RPi4 increases the throughput all the way up to 933Mbps, i.e, close to the full theoretical max throughput of gigabit ethernet. So the RPi4 does in fact achieve the full 10x increase over 100MBps ethernet such as was available on the RPi3; and you seem to have missed the RPi3B+'s "gigabit bit with only 1/3 the throughput" support in between – even though you could see that the throughput of the 3B+ was clearly well above what 100Mbps ethernet could ever achieve.

[Huzzahgamers_inc]

First of all this guy assumes that the software will not improve in a short time. Get the 4GB version and have fun with it! Don't worry about the software issues, they will be fixed before you know it!

[olivercopleston]

Hey Andreas, great vid as per usual. Have you tried using the h264ify extension on chrome? It “makes YouTube stream H.264 videos instead of VP8/VP9 videos”, and might allow the hardware acceleration to kick in.

[bobdan]

I run dual monitors on my desk so two HDMI ports are useful and the raspberry pi 3 b+ had gigabit Ethernet but it ran through the USB 2.0 bus.