Raspberry PI4 - who else is getting one?


Jcloud

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Mine's on back-order, another 1.5 weeks for delivery.  I'm impressed with the specs on paper, should be a fun little board to tinker with.  I'm interested to see if the video-touchscreen output has better response than last-gen.  At the very least it will be one heck of Plex client (presently I don't have any 4K media so my RPI3 works great).

 

What do you like to do with your RPIs?

Mine last RPI3 project was setting up:  BerryBoot>> Kali, Debian, RetroPI, and RasPlex.

 

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I currently have the 2GB model and one of the 4GB model on back-order.   I am quite impressed with it for general desktop type usage.   It feels much faster than previous models and I think this is a combination of factors such as extra RAM, faster I/O as well as the slightly better CPU.    This is the first Pi model I could see myself using instead of a desktop PC for a lot of Use Cases.   I was quite impressed with the fact it handled my ultra-wide monitor (3440 x 1440 resolution) out-of-the box.   It also (not unexpectedly) works fine with my 4K monitor and my 4K projector.

 

Be warned though that as soon as you do anything CPU intensive you will need active cooling to avoid thermal throttling as without it the CPU seems limited to something like 3B+ performance.  The CPU can quickly get too hot to touch.   It still 'feels' faster, though, when using the desktop presumably due to the other improvements.  I intend to get the Pimoroni fan shim when they are back in stock as that looks the best solution for cooling I have seen so far.  I also see that if you have active cooling you should be able to successfully overclock to 2GHz (from the base 1.5GHz).   These is also a firmware update due shortly that is meant to significantly improve thermal handling (although I have no idea how :) ).  I have not seen any feedback yet as to whether something like the Flirc case is an alternative that can provide sufficient passive cooling to avoid thermal throttling.

 

There seem to be a number of quirks at the software level at the moment that are probably caused by the move of Raspbian to be based on the Debian 'buster' release, but I expect these should mostly get resolved over the coming weeks.   You will also need a pending firmware upgrade before booting from anything other than the SD card is supported.  

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5 hours ago, itimpi said:

Be warned though that as soon as you do anything CPU intensive you will need active cooling to avoid thermal throttling as without it the CPU seems limited to something like 3B+ performance.  The CPU can quickly get too hot to touch. 

. . .

5 hours ago, itimpi said:

You will also need a pending firmware upgrade before booting from anything other than the SD card is supported.  

Thanks for heads up on the thermal issues, I'll admit to running my past devices passive only.

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I was interested in playing around with any generation of one to see if I could make my own digital picture frame that performs in a better way than my Nixplay digital frame does, but even if I managed to get it all together and mount an LCD in a not-ugly frame of some type the software would be my issue.....  

 

I would want, ideally, something that would display photos from an unraid share in a random order, or from google photos.  Maybe in some sort of configurable way, since there are a LOT of photos.

 

Not sure what else I would use a pi for.. that's just something that I've thought about for a while.  I'll probably never do it.

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  • 5 weeks later...
On 7/2/2019 at 10:45 AM, binhex said:

Check out the odroid N2 it's faster than the raspberry pi 4 and has 0 thermal issues although it is more expensive

Sent from my EML-L29 using Tapatalk
 

I'll second the odroid N2 option.

 

I have every sbc you can think of and the N2 is one of my favs, it's a great board. decently powerful, decent io, supports emmc.

 

I did grab two pi4's though, it's a good upgrade finally for the pi scene, but as mentioned you need good cooling, check out the pi4 flirc case as a sleek looking passive heatsink case, it's quite good.

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