“Had the 4g Pi 4 for about a month and it makes a fine, neat, descrete, speedy media player which was it's intended use. The case could have done with an assembly diagram - but hey ho - can't have everything”
“I gave this as a Christmas gift to my husband, and this is his review:
This is the best Pi yet:
Pros:
> The fastest Pi yet (3x the performance of the Pi 3 B+)
> With 4GB RAM there are no issues with multitasking multiple apps
> USB 3.0 ports so the Pi 4 can now make full use of high speed external storage
> Full 1Gb Ethernet (no longer provided through the USB bus)
> Can finally view full screen YouTube videos in 1080p without too many issues (still some screen tearing and dropped frames but definitely watchable)
Cons:
> The hottest Pi yet so it needs proper cooling or the CPU will throttle very quickly under load - I prefer passive cooling and have used both the Flirc and Argon Neo cases with no throttling even under sustained full load (small heat sinks are a waste of time unless combined with a fan)
> The performance of the on-board WiFi would be much improved if it were possible to attach separate antennas (as is possible with several other SBCs)”
“A very powerful little computer, however there are some thing future purchasers should be aware of: A new 'feature' of model 4 is that it will not boot is no screen is attached. To fix this you need to run rapsi-config and then set up the screen resolution in Advanced Options. Also I found it impossible to stop it over-heating using the standard case. At least use a heatsink.”
“The performance is very good indeed. You will notice the difference to a RasPi 3 instantly. USB 3 and Ethernet noticeably improved. This is a little power house.
However, everything comes with a price and in this case it's heat: I would not recommend running this little gem without a serious heatsink. Just running the standard Rasbian desktop leaves the CPU uncomfortably hot.
My preferred choice is the Aluminium Armour which provides cooling to three chips: CPU, RAM and GPU and keeps it at a comfortable 48ยบ C (Chip temperature) on the idle desktop. No annoying fan noise either.
Plus it looks really cool :)
All in all a very welcome improvement to the RasPi family!”
