The Raspberry Pi 400 Teardown

this isn't the pi 400. hold on a second [Music] this is the raspberry pi 400 it comes in a kit with a mouse power supply and hdmi cable for a hundred bucks and all you need to do is plug it into a monitor and you're in business and this is a raspberry pi keyboard it costs 20 bucks and it has a built-in usb hub at a glance it's hard to tell what's different when you look at them both at least from the top the f10 key is now a power button where it will used to be the scroll lock and the scroll lock indicator is now a power indicator when you pick it up though you might notice the pi 400 is just over 100 grams heavier than the pie keyboard weighing in at 384 grams which is just under a pound if you're into freedom units besides the weight like a man with a mullet the party is in the back i'll flip it over and here's the first big difference you can see there are vent holes in the bottom of it and now looking at the back of both of them it's obvious this isn't just another keyboard the pi 400 has all the same ports as the pi 4 model b with the exception of one of the usb 2.0 ports which is rewired internally for the keyboard but i have some questions how is this thing dissipating heat last year i showed the pi 4 needed good cooling when used in a case how's the pi 400 dealing with this problem and how did they cram a pi 4 model b inside the keyboard all the other projects i've seen end up with a really tall keyboard but this one's as short as the regular keyboard well let's crack it open and find out now looking at the bottom there aren't any screws but if you look really closely at the sides there are some slats and it looks like there are snap fit couplings that hold together the top and bottom just like the regular pie keyboard so i'll grab a couple tools from the workshop and see if i can get inside no red shirt jeff that's not how we're gonna open it [Music] sorry about that anyways i grabbed my plexiglas cutting tool because apparently it's the only tool i have that's both thin enough to get into that tiny crack and rigid enough to be able to pop the snaps open there's probably a better tool for this but you use what you got and it's definitely a lot better and safer than a sawzall i'll work my way around the edge unsnapping all these connectors and i'll try not to slice open one of my fingers now i can separate the top keyboard from the bottom shell and the first thing i see is a whole lot of heatsink it looks like the keyboard just has a flip up connector right here so i'll disconnect that the keyboard is just a keyboard so i'm going to set that aside for now now back to this heatsink the first thing i see is a conductive pad over in the top left corner i actually asked the pi engineers about this they said it grounds the keyboard to the rest of the pi 400 chassis so i'm going to pop that off and get to work on these number one little phillips screws all right looks like the heat sink there's nothing else that is holding the heatsink down that i can see so i'm i'm thinking that it's being stuck onto the system with chip or something else with some thermal adhesive so i'm going to rock it back and forth and see if i can unseat it there we go and there it is the pi 400's guts exposed the heatsink is huge and it's only thermally bonded to the system on a chip through this adhesive here so it'll definitely be able to dissipate the heat i still wonder though about the usb and network controllers sometimes they get a little bit hot if you're pushing it really hard it might be possible to put some other thermal bond between these chips and the heatsink but it's probably not going to be necessary unless you're going to use the pi 400 as a nas and looking at the board itself it's definitely not a pi 4b with the ports cut off it's an entirely new board and i already see a few circuit level differences from the regular pi4 it looks like the network connection uses a new ic i looked it up and noticed it supports poe plus plus but the pi 400 doesn't support power over ethernet otherwise you'll still need to plug in power through usbc and looking really closely at the system on a chip it looks like the part number is different than the chip in the regular pi 4 model b at the end it says c0t and on the model b i have it says b0t this indicates a newer stepping for the bcm 2711 chip which means this chip has some slight improvements and bug fixes compared to the version on the pi 4 model b the biggest improvement and i think the main reason for the massive heat sink is that this chip is clocked at 1.8 gigahertz by default the regular pi 4 model b is clocked at 1.5 gigahertz so let's pop out the board and see if there's anything interesting underneath there aren't any screws just these two clips that hold it down it's a great design from an assembly standpoint though it's not something i'd try to pop out unless i really had to all right looking at the bottom there's not much here besides traces that are connected to the components on the top through vias or maybe that should be via vias i don't know how to say that anyways nothing much to write home about on the bottom though i do see that if i follow the trace for the keyboard over here it goes all the way back to the usb controller chip on the other side which is right here anyways i like that it's a pretty simple and robust design i'm gonna put it back together and tell you a little bit more about the pi 400 i was wondering why it's called the pi 400 the first thing that came to my mind was the ancient ibm as400 system but that thing is huge and definitely doesn't have an integrated keyboard then i wondered maybe it's a reference to the fact that it's a pi 4 in a 78 key keyboard well it doesn't have 100 keys much less 400 so that's not it the more likely explanation relayed to me from someone at the pi hq is that it's an homage to the old amiga 500 which was a similar computer and keyboard in one form factor albeit with a much deeper back area kind of like an old apple ii but not quite as deep but this pie is a modern linux computer and if i were to put it in steve jobs words it's impossibly thin if you wanted to trick someone go unplug their desktop replace their keyboard with this one and plug the monitor into it they'll never figure out what happened anyways that's it for this video check out my separate review video to see how it works and subscribe until next time i'm jeff gearling when you pick it up though let's try that again b 2.0 ports which is rewired oh man how do you have bloopers when you're doing this it's always harder when you're actually doing it old omega omega it's an omega

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 347,949

Keywords: raspberry pi, pi 400, pi400, keyboard, pi 4, sbc, single board computer, pi foundation, bmc2711, broadcom, all-in-one, computer, release, teardown, insides, review, take apart, destroy, rebuild, inside, guts, internal

Id: OqpylxLhw98

Length: 7min 38sec (458 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020