PROS
Great value
Significant performance increase
Great free online learning resources
Built-in wireless connections
CONS
No Android support yet
KEY FEATURES
- Quad-core 1.1GHz CPU
- VideoCore IV GPU
- 1GB RAM
- 4x USB2.0, HDMI, Ethernet
- 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1
- Manufacturer: Raspberry Pi
- Review Price: £32.10
WHAT IS THE RASPBERRY PI 3?
The Raspberry Pi 3 is the latest version of the circuit-board computer that caused such a fuss in 2012. This is the most powerful version of the Pi, making the £4.25 Pi Zero look like, well, it’s worth about four quid.
To some this may seem the sort of annual refresh from your favourite phone makers. However, in adding greater power and both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to the Pi without increasing the price, it's now a more versatile "all-in-one" board. For almost everyone, it’s clearly the best Pi yet.
For those not solely interested in learning the basics of Python, C or Java, the added power and features make it far more powerful as a retro games machine, and more convenient as a media streamer too. There’s very little to dislike at £30.
RASPBERRY PI 3 – DESIGN AND FEATURES
The Raspberry Pi 3 looks almost identical to the Rasberry Pi 2. This means owners of Raspberry Pi 2s who have bought, made or 3D-printed their own cases will be able to slot this new model into them. For those who haven’t come across one of these computers before, it’s roughly the same size as the palm of your hand.
For £30 you get only the circuit-board computer: no power supply, no case, no cables. However, any owners of Android or Windows phones will be able to use their 5V phone charger and cable to power the Raspberry Pi 3. It uses microUSB, although you'll need a fairly high-amp plug (up to 2.5A if you have lots of peripherals) rather than the 1A ones that tend to come with cheaper phones.
The Pi 3 has identical ports to the old Raspberry Pi 2. Four USBs, an Ethernet port and a full-sized HDMI make up your main connectors. None of the USBs are 3.0-speed, just 2.0, but anything much faster would needlessly push up the budget when these boards are designed to run off a microSD card.
There’s no built-in storage to the Raspberry Pi, only a microSD slot on its underside. This port supports the higher-capacity microSDXC standard, so you could grab a 128GB microSD card for £40 and have a formidable portable mini-media player on your hands.
The one other conventional port on the Raspberry Pi 3 is a 3.5mm audio jack.
Where the Raspberry Pi 3 strays from the Raspberry Pi 2 blueprint is in including Wi-Fi (b/g/n) and Bluetooth on the board itself. In previous boards you had to use USB adapters for these features. While they can be bought for a few pounds, they add bulk to the board. You may still wish to use these if your current case interferes with wireless signals.
When the Pi 3 was released, the default Raspbian OS didn’t support these new connections, but support has since been patched in, and as the de facto OS many users will start with, this is great news.
The Raspberry Pi 3 still features 40 GPIO pins. These are used to connect items such as LEDs, motors and anything else you can think of for proper home-brew projects. Sitting between the HDMI and 3.5mm ports is the camera connection port, also inherited from the Raspberry Pi 2. The Raspberry Pi Foundation sells a 5-megapixel camera for around £20.
Depending on your use case for the Pi 3, you'll either use these connectors all the time or leave them for the more simple USB connectors. For those attracted to the board for tweaking and coding, the Raspberry Pi 3 is ready to hook up with the new BBC micro:bit too.
RASPBERRY PI 3 – SOFTWARE AND OS SUPPORT
If you buy the £30 Raspberry Pi package, no software is included. Fresh downloads of the various supported operating systems are all free, but there’s a slight premium to pay if you want to get a pre-loaded microSD card that will let you get up and running immediately.
For example, Pi Hut sells a starter kit that includes a charger, HDMI cable, Ethernet cable, case and 8GB memory card for £50. That’s not a bad deal, but it means that buyers who are simply after something to turn your old TV into a smart-ish TV may be better off with an Amazon Fire TV Stick, a Roku Stick or a Chromecast. Of course, these are far less fun to play with.
One downside that still isn't fully solved is that you can’t run Android on Raspberry Pi. There’s an in-progress community project to port it over, but if all you want is an Android interface for your TV then there are easier ways to get one.
The Raspberry Pi 3 is designed primarily to run the Debian-based Raspbian, now recognised as the computer’s "official" OS. While the Pi ships as a barebones skeleton unless you buy a package, Raspbian is full-fat, powerful and, most importantly, free.
Since its arrival in 2012, numerous bits have gradually been bolted on. to Raspbian. At this point in its development, it may have all the features you could wish for without having to download extra bits and pieces.
Raspbian includes Office-like apps, Minecraft, a web browser and tools to let you get started with the main programming languages the Raspberry Pi is designed to help you learn. Scratch is perhaps the most interesting of these for younger and less-experienced buyers. It’s a visual programming language, far less terrifying than C, which is perfect for creating simple programs and games without needing masses of experience.
You're not limited to Scratch, though, you can program whatever you want in the likes of C and Python, too.
The Raspberry Pi 3, and all other Pis, give you a low-cost and portable way to try out this stuff. But the real triumph is how this raw ability is made into something more thanks to the giant catalogue of well-presented tutorials available over at the Raspberry Pi website. There are more than 100 available, covering Python, Scratch and digging into the extra bits that plug into a Raspberry Pi.
These include Sense HATs, Breadboards, the Pi camera and more. If you or your child are going to really get into Raspberry Pi be aware that you'll be spending more than £30 over the life of a project, but it will be far cheaper than a Lego obsession in the long run.
Let me be honest: I come from the other end of the Raspberry Pi spectrum. While I find the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s resources inspiring, my time with the various Pis of the past has been much more about setting up a media player, or installing some game emulators and reliving SNES-flavoured memories from the 1990s.
There are several media players available, including a couple of different branches of XBMC. You can install a couple of them through NOOBs, which is a one-download installer that lets you choose between all the main Pi operating systems without hunting down separate installers. These include Raspbian, media centre OpenELEC and several others.
All of this isn't specific to the Raspberry Pi 3, of course, but it's good to know if you haven’t used a Raspberry Pi before. And if you feel like you’re drowning in acronyms, the Raspberry Pi downloads section lays out all your options clearly.
Unless you’re planning on only surface-level use, you'll have to embrace some basic Linux commands. You can see a few of them in action in our feature on turning the Raspberry Pi into a gaming centre.
RASPBERRY PI 3 – PERFORMANCE
There are three main benefits to the Raspberry Pi 3 over the Pi 2. It has Bluetooth; it has Wi-Fi; and it has a more powerful CPU/GPU pair.
Let’s deal with the CPU first. The Raspberry Pi 3 has a Broadcom BCM2837 CPU. This is a 1.2GHz quad-core CPU with the Cortex-A53 processor, as used in Qualcomm’s entry-level Snapdragon phone chipsets.
The Broadcom BCM2837 is a 64-bit CPU but the main benefit of the upgrade is that this chip is more efficient and far more powerful than the one in the Raspberry Pi 2 – a quad-core Cortex-A7 Broadcom BCM2836.
The difference in power is much greater than the move from a 900MHz quad-core processor to a 1.2GHz quad-core one might suggest.
To test this I dug out an old version of Geekbench, the only one that supported both the Linux software and ARM CPUs used here. For those interested, it’s version 2.4.2. This is so old it isn't really directly comparable with the results we get today from Geekbench 3, but I had an old Raspberry Pi 2 on hand to test. The Raspberry Pi 3 scores 2,086 points; the Pi 2 1,302.
The claim was that the Pi 3 is 50% more powerful than the Pi 2, and that’s what these results suggest; in fact it's actually closer to 60% when measured purely on Geekbench 2.4.2 results.
This isn't just down to the CPU. The GPU is more powerful, too, even though they're of the same VideoCore IV family. Why? Clock speed. The Raspberry Pi 3 has a 400MHz GPU, the Pi 2 a 250MHz one. RAM remains at 1GB of DDR2.
For basic video-streaming use, there isn't a great deal of difference to be seen between the two generations – but only because the Raspberry Pi 2 already had enough power to get by unless you were using the the latest H.265 codec in your videos. If you want to see the difference between the two, game emulation is the easiest way to do so.
While the Raspberry Pi 2 can run 16-bit games – such as those of the SNES – at full-speed, it struggles with many N64 games. The same is true of the Pi 3, to an extent. However, several games that were barely playable on a Pi 2 now run pretty comfortably on Pi 3, including The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. There remains a bit of slow-down, though, which slightly spoils the experience.
There isn’t a massive shift in what the Pi 3 can do, but it offers an improvement that's easy to appreciate.
USING THE RASPBERRY PI AS A PC
The extra power of the Pi 3 also makes it much less frustrating to use as a PC for web browsing, work and so on. There’s now much less obvious lag when using the basic Raspbian interface.
I still find the rendering of web pages in the default browser a little slow, so it still feels like a compromise. However, it's one that’s much easier to live with than the Raspberry Pi 2. The last-generation model lags far more frequently when you’re doing anything but the most basic of tasks.
I spent a few days using the Raspberry Pi 3 as my main work computer for a couple of three-hour stretches. While I’m not ready to retire my MacBook just yet, it did the trick for writing and researching online.
It's a serviceable alternative to the more expensive stick PCs that have failed to take off so far.
SHOULD YOU BUY THE RASPBERRY PI 3?
The Raspberry Pi 3 is certainly worth the upgrade from the £4 Pi Zero. It's also much more powerful than the Raspberry Pi 2, but for a lot of people the most noticeable benefit won't be the extra power, but that you don't need any annoying dongles to make the computer wireless.
Those connections and 'free' extra power (it costs roughly the same as the Pi 2 did at launch) make this the only Pi to buy if there’s a chance you might use it as anything other than a way to play with Scratch/Python, or to play some MP4 files you downloaded from the internet.
While there are a number of alternatives, none of them have managed to offer quite as compelling a package for this kind of money. Rather than getting all excited about the hardware, though, it’s actually a good idea to take a look through some of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s tutorials to see if the mini-projects on offer appeal.
They may be intended for a young audience, but their matter-of-fact presentation makes them suitable for all ages. If there’s nothing there to get you excited about learning programming, or that’s not your aim at all, you may want to consider one of the several very good media stick alternatives instead.
VERDICT
The best Pi yet continues to offer unbeatable value for money and an appeal for tech fiddlers and would-be coders alike.
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