Is the Raspberry Pi 4 really that bad?

I got myself a Raspberry Pi for this is the Raspberry Pi for model B 2 gigabyte edition and it's it's definitely the fastest recipe pie ever but if you've been following the launch you'll know that it's not been the smoothest of rides there are issues with the CPU throttling and overheating they're issues with the USB C port because it's been misconfigured you know I actually don't care about any of those things because all I care about is the 4k HDMI output to drive this 4k TV which will become my digital dashboard let me demonstrate this thing will end up sitting on the wall in portrait mode something like like this there goes the pipe and it will be calendar world time weather to do all that sort of thing just on the wall yeah that is all that I care about with the Raspberry Pi 4 but since I have it here and since the PI 4 will probably become the new go-to board for running octo print I thought well why not put it to its paces and test how hot it gets how much faster it actually is and I've already done the test but I can tell you with confidence this thing is an absolute beast now even though I'm not gonna be making use of it I am genuinely excited about the Raspberry Pi for performance because it is actually really good now if you look at why it is so much faster let's kind of compare it to the other boards that I've done the testing with so the first one is the original Raspberry Pi this is the Raspberry Pi 1 model B it has a single core 700 megahertz arm11 architecture CPU 256 gigs of ram weight makes 256 megabytes of RAM which is not a lot but you know at the time people were happy using it it was cheap and that was the main point but whenever I bring this thing out it is pretty obvious that it is really slow it is too slow to be usable this is the Raspberry Pi 3 model B this has 4 cores of the more modern arm a53 architecture clocked at 1.2 gigahertz and if I'm really honest the different architecture makes way more of a difference than any extra clock speed could make even if you overclock the Raspberry Pi 1 to a gigahertz which is kind of a mac city can put it out it's still not fast it's still really slow and that is actually the clock speed that the Raspberry Pi zero is running at this is basically the same board in a different form factors so if you're looking at the recipe pi zero you can take the benchmark results from this one kind of as a reference you know it's slightly faster but not by much and lastly the Raspberry Pi four has four cores clocked at 1.5 gigahertz they're the modern ARM Cortex a 72 architecture and that again is a huge boost over the 53 a 53 architecture of the Raspberry Pi 3 and this one also has 2 gigs of ram I would have probably ordered the 1 gigabyte version since that's probably enough for what I'm using it for but you know just to keep that in mind this is 2 gigs this is one gigabyte of RAM and the old one has 0.25 gigabytes of RAM 256 megabytes so there is a bit of a difference in the hard way that these boards use but just citing the specs I don't think does it justice - you know how much faster these are from generation to generation so what I did to test these were three different tests one for performance one for temperatures using the floor thermal camera and one for power consumption using three different power supplies and just checking whether the 1m 1.8 m or 2.4 m power supply is sufficient and just checking how much output current you need out of you use the power supply to properly power these PI's without them throttling so it in all this testing with the newest octa-pie image the one that runs on the Raspberry Pi 4 fully updated as of August 8 2019 running off of a kingston micro SD card this one is a uhs-1 u3 card so it's a pretty fast card one thing that's actually really cool with the Raspberry Pi series is that it can just take one image one install and just move the SD card between generations and it's still gonna boot up I use the exact same image on the recipe pi-1 as I did on the recipe pie for no issues at all so for the first performance test I just take the first thing the Raspberry Pi does booting up and there's already a bit of a difference between the results I mission at the time that it took until the login screen was shown and for the recipe PI one that took 55 seconds the Raspberry Pi 3 took 33 seconds and the recipe PI 4 took 27 seconds with the recipe PI 3 and 2 for being so close I think it's actually the SD card that is becoming the bottleneck here I would say the difference between the recipe PI 4 & 3 is kind of negligible here while the recipe PI 1 already took twice as long as the recipe PI fourths next up load times for a stock up to a print interface using my laptop on a good Wi-Fi connection and this is measured from the moment that I hit return on the address bar to the octoprint interface fully loading with all its features in there and with this one I think the memory difference between these boards actually makes a huge difference the recipe pi-1 took 44 seconds to load up the recipe PI 3 took 11 seconds and the Raspberry Pi 4 took just 3 seconds so that was basically instantaneous this is one of the things that you're gonna do over and over during a print job you just open up your browser a check on what the print is doing or you open it up to upload stuff so these time differences just sum up with you hating on your device just loading up the interface so that is a massive difference and multiplies over time in case you're wondering yes the raspberry PI's were all plugged in to Gigabit Ethernet just to take the Wi-Fi equation on these smaller transmitters out of the equation so next up a test that would take a bit longer to complete my goal was to heat up the Raspberry Pi 4 to a point where it is maybe going to heat up and maybe throttle so what I did is I sliced a higher polygon and modified 3d Benji and had the Raspberry Pi or octoprint compute how long that print was gonna do that is just the g-code analysis that is built into octave prints and for this one I just timed how long it took for that view more info panel to become available for that 1g code so buckle up this one's gonna be good the Raspberry Pi one took 16 minutes and 29 seconds which is long like you're not gonna be waiting that long before you start a print the recipe pi 3 took 1 minute 28 seconds that is a performance difference of 10x raspberry pi 3 is 10 times as fast as the Raspberry Pi 1 then lastly the Raspberry Pi 4 took 23 seconds that is another 3x performance improvement over the raspberry pi 3 again it's a more modern CPU architecture it's clock faster and the extra RAM may also have helped quite a bit here also between each of these generations and lastly for performance I checked how much CPU load I was seeing on each of these while it was printing while it was actively streaming gqo two crucial I three mark three and if the load was too high it would mean that not only with your interface below the slower while the board was using CPU resources to actually stream g-code but the worst case would be the CPU just not being able to keep up at all and slowing down the print or even getting the printer to stall because it wouldn't supply g-code lines fast enough and for the Raspberry Pi one I was constantly seeing loads between 70 and 85 percent which is you know on the upper limit this is an uncomfortable amount of load and I'm thinking this is actually fully Peg's there's something else going on that doesn't allow it to use more CPU resources but this thing is just completely busy with streaming g-code so besides the load times this is not a good choice for running octoprint the Raspberry Pi 3 was a lot better it was between 15 and 30 percent on a single cores so it still had the other three cores available to do the web interface and system services and all that but even on that one core I only ever saw 30 percent so I'm wondering if this thing even clocked up to its full speed while it's printing the recipe pi4 pretty similar ten to thirty percent again it's not a problem for this board and also stream decode in real time to a printer and we're gonna be looking at the temperatures in a second and the temperatures do suggest that there is still a lot more Headroom in this board while it's printing so talking about temperatures let's go check those out the Raspberry Pi one is a really low power board there are three components on here that actually generate heat the first one is the input regulator this is a linear regulator this is just burning off the extra voltage from the 5 volt port to 3.3 volts for the CPU then of course the CPU itself and the ethernet chip that one also heats up and they you know no matter what you do with them they all hover around 50 degrees or 55 if you actually put a stress test on it but this thing doesn't really heat up at all 50 degrees with no heatsink is fine this thing is definitely not need a heatsink the Raspberry Pi 3 actually has a different input power regulator this is a switch mode power supply this one doesn't just waste extra voltage Ted is getting on the USB port but it's efficiently stepping it down to supply the CPU and the ethernet chip and this one's actually running a bit cooler when idle it only heats up to 45 degrees when idle when printing it hovers around 50 degrees again and when I'm running a 4 core stress test on it it up to only 67 degrees on the CPU and lastly the Raspberry Pi for this one does have that metal heat spreader over the high over the CPU which the Raspberry Pi model 3 B+ introduced so this one is a bit harder to actually shoot with the Fleur camera because this thing is reflective so what I did I just grabbed a piece of black electrical tape which has a really good emissivity for the thermal camera and I used that to measure the CPU Tim's one of the other things that that metal heat spreader introduces is better thermal conductivity not just towards the air but also into your finger so a hot metal part will always feel hotter than a hot plastic part so even if these were at the same temperature the pi/4 would still feel hotter to you simply because that metal slug can transfer heat very efficiently into your finger while plastic cannot but yes as expected the Raspberry Pi for it does run a good bit hotter it runs at 62 degrees on the CPU when idle so that's the hottest one of the bunch so far when printing it bumps up to 65 degrees which is not a lot so that low temperature increase tells us that it's not actually spending a lot of its resources on supplying g-code to the printer but when I'm actually running a stress test on this PI 4 and all four cores it does heat up to 83 degrees Celsius surface temperature and yes it does throttle but again that is a synthetic load which loads the CPU cores more than they usually would and I've not seen throttling in Rijo use in you know octoprint doing its thing and simulating the g-code it's always run at ku klux bit there only when I ran the synthetic benchmark this synthetic load test did it run down so in real life I don't think it ever will throttle unless you're running some super high-end computer load on it and if you do need that then you can always put a heat sink or a fan on it but for I think for most users you don't need a heatsink on this it will protect itself now lastly power consumption I was gonna use this USB test that has like a small OLED display in here telling you exactly how much power whatever you plug in the other end right here draws but the problem was this as soon as I tried to run a Raspberry Pi through this tester device started throwing under-voltage and you know not enough power to use B issues which means that this thing has so much resistance internally that as soon as you use it it drops the voltage too much and the recipe pie doesn't get enough power without it these thing ran fine with the exact same configuration so this thing not really usable sorry so what I did instead is I used three different power supplies these are not the exact ones that I used but so let me safely shut down this pie real quick so that I can show you which one I did actually use so real simple stuff I started with this HTC One amps up I 5 volt 1 amp this is the one that came with the HTC vive then the next step up is this 1.8 amp supply from LG this came with my phone and then lastly this Anki unit that still has the LED glowing this is a 2.4 amp power delivery unit that both has they use be a port and the SBC 2.4 m/s on USB is kind of the same as any other like decent USB power supply so try these 3 raspberry PI's with different sorts of stresses on them so the one I'm supply only really runs the Raspberry Pi one fine I used a Python script based on Harlem squirrels publication I'll link that below to give me feedback on what issues the Raspberry Pi reported on itself and I also used that for the throttling and over temperatures checks that we did just previously and I'm not sure if the recipe PI one just doesn't report those things or if it's actually fine but I didn't have any issues running that off of the 1m supply at all the Raspberry Pi 3 was throwing some issues right at food when I was using just this white snow named use B cable but as soon as I switched over to this anchor whatever Power Core Power something this decent anchor cable it was fine it ran with no issues off of the 1 amp supply and it's a similar story with the Raspberry Pi for this uses a USBC cable obviously I don't even know where I got this one from but it worked fine with the 1.8 amp supply but with the 1 amp supply it did report under voltage issues and also instead of letting me shut it down it actually just hard reset so even with all the things that the PI is trying to do to account for that under voltage and on the power situation and one of supply just isn't enough but in 1.8 m supply is fine I just really like using these anchor power supplies there are two point four ampere port four point eight amp total and that just gives you a bit of extra Headroom to plug in things into the USB ports such as webcams or 3d printers if those are drawing power through USB so to sum that up all the PI's were running just fine off of a 1.8 m supply but only the Raspberry Pi one ran fine with the one amp which is kind of expected I actually didn't expect the 1.8 m supply to do that well I thought I needed the 2.4 for at least the Raspberry Pi for it but you know another thing I learned and lastly I also wanted to check whether the Raspberry Pi 4 was actually able to run off of a USB C power delivery power supply and a USBC cord so I have two different supplies here one is the anchor what is my laptop supply this is a 60 watt power delivery huawei supply and I know this works fine for my laptop my phone and other things so this is my reference and I used a USB C to USBC cable the same one that actually charged my lab to width which is this 3 meter Chui tick Joey take Joey ticks and the recipe pie for was fine on the first plugin it booted up straight away no issues whatsoever it may just be that this cable is not to use B spec but it works it charges my laptop with full power it charges the or it powers the Raspberry Pi for charging my phone this thing works probably not to spec probably cause some issues somewhere else but for this it works now the other cable that I tried is this USB 3 anchor cable which is a bit thicker and probably a bit more to spec and this one actually did not work so I plugged it in into both of these power delivery supplies and the Raspberry Pi 4 was just doing nothing at all so again my thought here is that the cheaper USB cable isn't actually made properly to spec and because this anchor cable is made to spec it is causing issues with the improper implementation of the USB C port on the Raspberry Pi 4 but if they're honest how many of you are actually going to be powering the Raspberry Pi 4 off of a USB C powers of what you're probably going to be using is that's a microUSB cable what you're probably going to be using is a USB a to use PC cable these are the most common ones they come with phones they come with everything and these just all work so closing thoughts on the Raspberry Pi for is it as buggy and as bad as some people seem to portrayed I don't think so I think it's actually really good board now the two issues that we saw and that are very real which is over temperature and throttling just I've not gotten it to throttle in real applications I've only gotten it to throttle in synthetic loads so for you know your typical workload it's it's totally adequate now the interesting thing here is that this board is advertised with a 1.5 gigahertz clock speed as it's like nominal clock what other manufacturers have started doing as an Intel AMD Nvidia and AMD graphics cards is they've they've started telling you you know a lower base clock that's guaranteed and then started going oh it but but it turbos up to you know 3.6 gigahertz but it's base clock its guarantee clock is way lower and the way I see it is the Raspberry Pi 4 is doing the exact same thing based on how hot it is and how much power it's getting it's dynamically adjusting its clock speed and when all conditions are good it can boost up to a higher clock speed it's just it's the same thing just backwards so if you extra spin it that way is in real life applications this thing boosts up to its full 1.5 gigahertz almost always so I have no problem with that on the other hand to use PC power supply thing don't think is much of an issue we're all using USB a still and with that it works just fine from what I've seen with these power supplies it's actually not much more power hungry than the Raspberry Pi 3 so wherever a recipe Pi 3 works the Raspberry Pi 4 will also work now besides all that there are actually two things about the Raspberry Pi 4 that I wish were different that are kind of unnecessary I feel like and that are annoying to me the first one is the fact that they're using micro HDMI they've got two of them yeah that's fine can run two screens but the micro HDMI port is such a fragile penny tiny little port while I've tested this have already broken one micro HDMI cable they're kind of disposable we plug them in ten times and they're broken and that's just something I've seen with micro-hdmi not just on the pi/4 but also on my cameras the large HDMI port is just so much more robust you know if you're gonna use a smaller connector why not go with use BC like use BC outputs the same signal as micro HDMI so that's kind of a bummer and the other thing is they've downgraded the micro SD slot this is not a clicky slot anymore you have to actually pull out the card on the Raspberry Pi 3 you have this nice click-click slot that is so satisfying you click it in and then you pull it out and it's loose with the recipe pie before you actually have to jam it in and then fry it it's not a big deal but it's it's it's a downgrade so it's probably the cost-saving measure that's safe is like 37 somewhere which went to another part of the board so it's all good and because I know you guys have been staring at it the entire video let's peel off this protective film and get it over with well I thank my patrons who are making this entire channel possible so big thank you to Andy fair brian raker crystal the day dorian gray to a scooter wait hold on this is a good one francisco peter james c foley jimmy lee byunghun my mouth is hung matthew Oswald Mike McGee Nathan haste mm-hmm Willie virus Paul Hardy Robert Hahn book Runa Fung and William Devine those are all patrons in the shout out here if you want to join in as well and help keep this channel going you can do so right here or you can join through youtube memberships both patrons and YouTube members get access to monthly exclusive live streams and more so yeah thank you to everyone who's already supporting the channel and thank you all for watching I will see you all in the next one hey and I know you're probably not subscribed yet so why not do that right now

Channel: Thomas Sanladerer

Views: 607,107

Keywords: 3D printing, Tom's, 3D printer, RepRap, guide, raspberry pi 4 review, raspberry pi, raspberry pi 4, pi 4, raspberry pi projects, raspberry pi 4 projects, single board computer, raspberry pi 3, pi 3, raspberry pi foundation, raspberry pi 4b, raspberry pi 4 vs 3, raspberry pi 4 cooling, new raspberry pi, raspberry pi 4k, rpi 4, noctua fan, heat sink, rasp pi 4b, pi 4b, Octoprint, Octopi, benchmark, thermal images, FLIR, raspberry pi 4 model b

Id: pOboAW5RqAg

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 09 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/NedSc]

It's the same size as every other Pi since the 1 B+, and it's slightly smaller than the original B (seen on the far right in the video thumbnail).

[u/The_Capt_Midnight]

It seems like everything is now USB-C. My car only has it built-in as well. So the RP4 has issues with being powered by USB-C then?