Welcome to another video from explaining computers dot com, and to a special extra
episode about the Raspberry Pi 4 model B.
Yes, in late June 2019, the Raspberry Pi foundation have surprised us with a new
pi, and I'm very grateful the've sent me one to take a look at.
Now, you'll be very pleased to hear that the Raspberry Pi 4 B is a very significant upgrade, while
still maintaining backwards compatibility with previous models.
So, let's go and take a closer look.
So, this is going to be a video full of surpises, and the first one is this. This is a very large box isn't it? This is the Raspberry
Pi 4B desktop kit and this contains all the things you need to start using a
Raspberry Pi 4B as your desktop computer. And this costs one hundred and five
pounds or one hundred and twenty dollars but do not fear you can still buy an
individual Raspberry Pi 4B. But because I've been sent this rather nice
desktop kit obviously we'll start by looking at this. So let's open it up, and
here we are -- nice and easy to get inside -- and there we are and straight away we can
see Raspberry Pi stuff. Here we have in the middle a Raspberry Pi official case
which contains the Raspberry Pi 4B which we'll look at that a lot more depth obviously
a bit later in the video. And in addition to that we have a
Raspberry Pi mouse, and we have a new Raspberry Pi USB C power supply. Yes the
Raspberry Pi 4B uses a USB C power supply -- there's one of the first changes
to the Pi. And beneath here this lifts out I'm sure -- it does something like, like
this. Come out! Come out! There we are. And under here we've got a Raspberry Pi
keyboard and hub. That looks rather nice. And also down here we've got some
connection leads, so lots of exciting things in this desktop kit. But I'm sure
initially at least I think the thing you're most interested in is the Raspberry Pi
4B itself would you be inside this case ,which I think
just clicks apart. There it is. There is the Raspberry Pi 4B. So let's take
a closer look at this new Pi.
So I've now put the accessories safely to one side so we can take a closer look at the star of our show, the brand new Raspberry
Pi 4 B. And the second surprise to reveal here is that you can buy a Raspberry Pi
4B in one of three different versions. Because you can buy a Raspberry
Pi for B with either 1, 2 or 4 gigabyte of RAM. And to give you the prices, the 1GB
gigabyte 2 Raspberry Pi 4 B costs £33 or $35. The 2GB Raspberry
Pi 4D costs £43 or $45. Snd the 4GB Raspberry Pi 4B costs £53
or $55. So you can make your choice in terms of price in terms
of how much RAM you have on your Raspberry Pi 4B. Now as you probably
noticed already things have changed a bit on the top of the Pi, the components
are slightly different in some cases so let's compare this to the previous
Raspberry Pi 3 B+. And there we are the new PI is now sitting next to its a
older comrade. And straight away you can see that they've switched over the
position of the USB ports and there if that socket which is now a mirror of the
previous PI and we can see we've got our USB C power connector here compared to
the microUSB power connector on previous pies and other changes down here which
I'll get to in a second and what all this means is whilst the PI is
compatible with previous models of rust with PI 4 P it's got the same form
factor it won't go in the same cases we need new cases for the the rapid pipe 4
bit so let's take a bit of a closer look at the specs of this board and the
raspberry pi 4 B is based on a Broadcom BCM 2711 system on a chip with a 64-bit
quad-core arm cortex a7 t2 cpu running at 1.5 gigahertz
it's just noted this is paired with 1 2 or 4 gigabytes of RAM that's a low-power
ddr4 Ram and the board also good wireless connectivity specifically
it's got dual band 802 1-1 B G and an AC Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0 and as you
probably noticed if you're into your PI's we still have the camera connect to
and display connector on top of the board in exactly the same positions they
were previously the myth pcs I and DSi connectors are just we found them on
previous PI's if we turn to the first short edge things get very exciting
because for the first time on a PI we've got Gigabit Ethernet and then our four
type a USB ports as you can see here two of them as you probably noticed already
are USB 3 so yes we've got 2 USB 3 port and Gigabit Ethernet on a PI so if for
example you want to use a PI to build an AZ that's very good news indeed rotating
around to the first long gauge we find a familiar 3.5 millimeter jack for audio
and composite video output and then at the other end of this edge we have our
USB C power connector and the Raspberry Pi 4 B requires 5 volts at at least 3
amps which can be delivered either through the USBC connector or via GPO or
using a power over ethernet hat and then in the middle of those connectors we
find to count them two micro HDMI connectors yes the full-sized HDMI
connector has gone to be replaced with these 2 micro HDMI ports and so if you
are wondering why there were two leads in their desktop kit this is why we now
have dual display support on a Raspberry Pi and these micro HDMI connectors
support resolutions up to 4k and in this context it's also worth noting that the
Raspberry Pi 4 be offers hardware decoding at both 1080p and 4k video at
up to 60 frames a second turning to the second short edge we find that nothing
has changed we still have a display connector where it was on previous PI's
and similarly if we turn to the second long edge we find those changes again
we've got our familiar 40 pin Raspberry Pi GPIO connector and also the four pin
power over ethernet or p OE connector first introduced on the Raspberry Pi 3
b+ if we move back to the top of the board and I'll just show you underneath
because of course we do have underneath via microSD card slot which obviously
we're putting a card in very soon to a boot up the PI but other than that
nothing of great excitement underneath and so there we are
that is the spec of our new Raspberry Pi 4b and just to give you a summary this
is a Raspberry Pi with 1 2 or 4 gigabytes of RAM 2 USB 3 ports Gigabit
Ethernet USB C power and dual 4k output and so I think by anybody's measure this
is a very significant upgrade to the Raspberry Pi so let's take a brief look
at the Raspberry Pi for the accessories and the first of these is the power
supply which we have here already removed it from its little box and this
provides the 5 volts at 3 are necessary to run the rush to PI 4 be with it's a
USBC connector on the end and the thing I like about this it's got a very very
long lead which is great to say on a power supply so often I have to put an
extension lead on a power supply for a single board computer I won't have to do
that for this one it's got a nice long lean and talking of leads these are the
two HDMI leads that came in the box they've got the microwaves do you might
well then to go into the PI and full-size a steam like the other to go
into a monitor or a record or whatever else you're putting them into and here
again is the case which we saw earlier the pie came in the case a standard
Raspberry Pi case but obviously we designed to take the Raspberry Pi for
the different cutouts to two previous cases and very easy to put the pie in
here you just literally drop it in like this and then you drop SIA the cover on
the top and it all clips down the phone clip right there we are
and the PI's now easily in the case and you can just put your microSD card in
the back and that just goes in there I think like that so the PI is all ready
for action but of course to use the PI's has to
have a key more than a mouse and as we saw in the
raspy pie kit that was the Raspberry Pi Mouse this was released earlier I think
in 2019 need to bring in a sternly of an eye to let us in there never seen around
a fire mouse before in there in the flesh of
plastic although it is this could have a red scroll with us rather nicer looking
mouse and finally we have the Raspberry Pi keyboard and ER hub which we will
open up by the magic of filmmaking and it's actually a rather nice keyboard
it's very similar to the keyboard I use a lot over time
nice soft keys very good if you've got arthritis or eyesight things like that
good spacebar action and as you can see here it has got the hub at the back it's
got three USB type a ports there and it plugs into the PI using a this red lead
which goes in life curve that into microUSB that will go into the PI and it
gives you the extra USB port either hub at the back so there we are it's now
time to put all of this together and to boot up the Raspberry Pi for model B
so here we are booting into raspbian on the Raspberry
Pi 4b and this is a new version of raspbian released concurrently with the
Raspberry Pi 4p to support other states new hardware and in fact what I'm
running here is probably a pre-release because I've been supplied this before
release date and I don't necessarily have everything here I don't think and
if we look into programming stuff is there internet we don't have for example
Libre Office installed here so this might not be final software I don't know
so I don't want to judge it too much on that and because of that and therefore
not going to do significant performance tests in this video I will leave those
to future videos but it's interesting I think to look here we go to accessories
and a task manager and you'll see that we've got our well three seven three one
megabytes of RAM there this is a 4 gigabyte raspberry pi 4 B the other
memory is being used by the GPU here go to preferences and PI configuration
you'll see my GPU allocated 256 megabytes which we can do on a pie with
a 4 gigabytes of RAM I've still got to get my head around the fact we can now
buy raspberry pies with 1 2 or 4 gigabytes of RAM and talking of the GPU
will make you start to think about graphical performance letters have a
little bit look at that let's go into the chromium web browser
and here we are we can clearly do normal web browsing very well indeed I have to
upgrade Maya SVC page here won't I put the Raspberry Pi for be at the top of
that paisa and we get to say YouTube and play a sample clip I know that's what
you all want to see me do well just to fullscreen that and a hopefully it'll
catch up there we are this will be playing in there 1080p I
think FS is 1080p and this looks pretty good
this is much better than we'd normally see on a Raspberry Pi isn't it which is
rather good playback and that's clearly a very good thing raspberry PI's have
struggled a bit with the media playback for a while now and this clearly with
this latest upgrade we are going to have that problem anymore so that's a that's
very good to see and I think for now I'm going to leave this because I've got to
come back into all sorts of tests in future videos tests of cooling and
performance and all that type of thing but the one thing I would
say is that the desktop experience here is just very nice it's very fluid and
the Raspberry Pi foundation in their marketing for the Raspberry Pi 4b
suggests it has performance comparable to entry-level x86 systems and I think
that's a fair comparison to make and that's not to suggest that a raspy PI 4
B is the same as the average desktop PC it obviously isn't but if you want to do
basic computing on a Raspberry Pi for B things like web browsing with a media
playback email or bit of office work that's obviously it's very much well up
to that task and I'm sure that's why they now sell via Raspberry Pi for the
desktop kit as we'll previously looking at so there we are
this is raspbian on the Raspberry Pi for B it's always great to see where as been
running regardless I think it's just a nice operating system to use and I'll be
testing it out a lot more in future videos
last beep i4b is a very significant upgrade that will have a very large
impact on the SBC marketplace why well because for a few years now if you've
wanted to buy a pipe priced single board computer you've had a trade off to make
on the one hand you could have bought a Raspberry Pi a three be a three-beat
plus with fantastic software support great support for the GPU in in the
software not least and fantastic community support or you could have
bought a competitor board with far worse software support for worse community
support but competitor boards have increasingly had features not found on
the PI things like a USB 3 ports gigabit ethernet more memory and 4k output and
so now we've got on a Raspberry Pi USB 3 port Gigabit Ethernet more memory for
Kate output there were far fewer reasons to buy a competitive board and so the
Raspberry Pi 4b could blow many of its competitors out of the market I very
much look forward to testing out to recipe pie for B in future videos using
it in projects running performance tests probably doing a new cooling video and
I'd be very interested to hear what you think in the new raspberry pi 4 be what
you plan to do with it please let us all know down in the comments section but
now that's it for another video if you enjoyed but you see no please press the
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