Technoglitch
Core Member
Design
There have also been some changes to the physical layout of the Raspberry Pi motherboard, although it remains physically the same size as the Pi 2. The power and activity lights have migrated from the top-left to the bottom-left of the board, which may be a problem depending on your case's design. The "RUN" (reset) header is also now on the other side of your GPIO pins.
OS and built-in Wi-Fi
The easiest way to install an operating system on the Raspberry Pi is to download the NOOBS installer from www.raspberrypi.org and copy it to a microSD card (8GB minimum, and the fastest you can get: see, how to choose an SD card). When you boot up the Pi, you'll then get a choice of operating systems to install, from the easy-to-use Linux distro Raspbian to the OpenELEC media center to the twilight zone of RISC OS. The official build of NOOBS for the Pi 3 wasn't yet available while I was testing, so NOOBS would only give me the choice of installing Raspbian and, even then, I had some compatibility warnings.
At 10m distance from the router and through a couple of walls, the Pi managed to transfer data at 12Mbit/s, compared to 26Mbit/s for an 802.11n laptop. Transfer rates weren’t much quicker when we were right next to the router, however; here we saw a maximum of 19Mbit/s, compared to over 80Mbit/s from our laptop.
This means the Pi 3’s Wi-Fi isn’t quick enough to max out the average fibre broadband connection, but it’s certainly fine for web browsing, downloading software packages and audio and video streaming.
Wi-Fi testing 1m range 10m range
Pi 19.07Mbit/s 11.98Mbit/s
Centrino 83.89Mbit/s 26.21Mbit/s
Performance
The Pi 2 had a quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 chip, but the Pi 3's chip has been upgraded to a newer Cortex-A53. To see how fast the Pi 3 is, I first ran Roy Longbottom's Whetstone Pi A7. This returned a score of 711, which makes the Pi 3 65% quicker than the 432 I saw from the Pi 2. Using the cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq command, I saw that the Pi 3's chip was running at 1.2GHz during the benchmark, which is 300MHz quicker than the Pi 2's chip.
Power consumption
Interestingly, the Pi 3's processor throttled back to 600MHz when the system was at idle; the Pi 2's always ran at 900MHz (according to the CPU clock speed command I was running). This made a difference to power consumption. The Pi 2 drew 3.2W at idle and 3.8W under load, while the Pi 3 drew 2.5W and 3.8W. This is a 22% power saving at idle, which is not to be sniffed at. Despite the lower power drain, the Pi 3 was able to power up and access a 3TB external laptop hard disk - something the Pi 2 couldn’t manage.
Conclusion
The Raspberry Pi 2 was a revelation, but the Pi 3 is more of an incremental improvement. However, the speed boost certainly makes a difference, and the built-in Wi-Fi will make the Raspberry Pi more useful for various projects. With capable Wi-Fi performance (away from heavily congested areas at least), the new model cements the Pi's position as the ultimate hobbyist computer, particularly as it still costs the same £30.
Raspberry Pi 3 review - Wi-Fi tests and benchmarks | Expert Reviews
There have also been some changes to the physical layout of the Raspberry Pi motherboard, although it remains physically the same size as the Pi 2. The power and activity lights have migrated from the top-left to the bottom-left of the board, which may be a problem depending on your case's design. The "RUN" (reset) header is also now on the other side of your GPIO pins.
OS and built-in Wi-Fi
The easiest way to install an operating system on the Raspberry Pi is to download the NOOBS installer from www.raspberrypi.org and copy it to a microSD card (8GB minimum, and the fastest you can get: see, how to choose an SD card). When you boot up the Pi, you'll then get a choice of operating systems to install, from the easy-to-use Linux distro Raspbian to the OpenELEC media center to the twilight zone of RISC OS. The official build of NOOBS for the Pi 3 wasn't yet available while I was testing, so NOOBS would only give me the choice of installing Raspbian and, even then, I had some compatibility warnings.
At 10m distance from the router and through a couple of walls, the Pi managed to transfer data at 12Mbit/s, compared to 26Mbit/s for an 802.11n laptop. Transfer rates weren’t much quicker when we were right next to the router, however; here we saw a maximum of 19Mbit/s, compared to over 80Mbit/s from our laptop.
This means the Pi 3’s Wi-Fi isn’t quick enough to max out the average fibre broadband connection, but it’s certainly fine for web browsing, downloading software packages and audio and video streaming.
Wi-Fi testing 1m range 10m range
Pi 19.07Mbit/s 11.98Mbit/s
Centrino 83.89Mbit/s 26.21Mbit/s
Performance
The Pi 2 had a quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 chip, but the Pi 3's chip has been upgraded to a newer Cortex-A53. To see how fast the Pi 3 is, I first ran Roy Longbottom's Whetstone Pi A7. This returned a score of 711, which makes the Pi 3 65% quicker than the 432 I saw from the Pi 2. Using the cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq command, I saw that the Pi 3's chip was running at 1.2GHz during the benchmark, which is 300MHz quicker than the Pi 2's chip.
Power consumption
Interestingly, the Pi 3's processor throttled back to 600MHz when the system was at idle; the Pi 2's always ran at 900MHz (according to the CPU clock speed command I was running). This made a difference to power consumption. The Pi 2 drew 3.2W at idle and 3.8W under load, while the Pi 3 drew 2.5W and 3.8W. This is a 22% power saving at idle, which is not to be sniffed at. Despite the lower power drain, the Pi 3 was able to power up and access a 3TB external laptop hard disk - something the Pi 2 couldn’t manage.
Conclusion
The Raspberry Pi 2 was a revelation, but the Pi 3 is more of an incremental improvement. However, the speed boost certainly makes a difference, and the built-in Wi-Fi will make the Raspberry Pi more useful for various projects. With capable Wi-Fi performance (away from heavily congested areas at least), the new model cements the Pi's position as the ultimate hobbyist computer, particularly as it still costs the same £30.
Raspberry Pi 3 review - Wi-Fi tests and benchmarks | Expert Reviews
