Raspberry Pi 4 8GB first experience
As a PC DIY player, I am more or less interested in Single Board Computer, and as the most well-known representative of SBC, Raspberry Pi has been my personal attention since its release, and I also started it when I was in the second generation. A B version, but because it is purely personal hobbies, not work or development needs, naturally it will be ashes after playing with it, but its performance is very weak, which is actually an important reason why I did not continue to toss it. It was not until the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 last year that the shortcomings of this SBC's weak performance were completely changed.
Raspberry Pi 4 is equipped with Broadcom BCM2711 SoC and quad-core Cortex-A72 in the CPU part. Although this configuration is not enough compared to today's mainstream mobile phone SoCs, for the performance of an SBC, I believe most players and users I was satisfied with everything, and I was really excited at the time, but since I had too many things to play with, I was too tired to get out of it, so I slowly forgot about it. But at the end of May of this year, Raspberry Pi 4 suddenly announced an 8GB memory version, which aroused my interest again, so I started to play with it for some time recently.
Of course, I didn't place the order like "Boiled Water and Lujiao". I also did some homework before starting, first of all, the purchase of the power supply. Shortly after the Raspberry Pi 4 was launched last year, it was revealed that the USB-C port had a design flaw and would be incompatible with the PD charging head. However, subsequent batches of shipments are said to have improved, so this 8GB version is theoretically not. There will be this problem, and this new version also modified the power module (but did not say what it is for), the official said that this also delayed some launch time, originally I was thinking about using the PD charging head that I had at hand, But in the end, I chose a 5V/3A output charging head that is said to be specially made for Raspberry Pi, with a USB-C charging cable with a switch.
Then there is heat dissipation. The Broadcom BCM2711 SoC uses a 28nm process, and the CPU is commonly known as a large core. Although the maximum frequency is limited to 1.5GHz, according to some users who have already started, the heat of the Raspberry Pi 4 is still quite large. , plus I'm bored, thinking about buying it to play overclocking... So I specially installed an accessory with dual fans for active cooling. There are also mini towers and even water cooling on the Internet, but I think those are a bit exaggerated. . What's interesting is that Cooler Master also launched a Raspberry Pi 4 case some time ago, claiming that it can suppress the heat after overclocking, but that case is currently only sold abroad, let's see if you can borrow one to experience it later .
Since it has developed to the 4th generation, Raspberry Pi's current operating system, software, tutorials, etc. are very mature, so even if you are not a developer or a maker (Marker), in fact, install the official Raspberry Pi OS, put As an ultra-small computer, it can cope with surfing the Internet, watching videos, typing documents, etc., and there is no problem at all.
And the installation method of the entire operating system is also very simple. Download the latest firmware from the official website of Raspberry Pi, use the official Imager to burn it into the MicroSD card, then insert the card into the Raspberry Pi, plug in and start the system. This is easier, I guess even my girlfriend who knows nothing about electronics should know how to do it.
Of course, I still want to try a more advanced way of playing, mainly because I think the read and write speed of the MicroSD card slot is too slow, so I think about installing the system on a mobile U disk or SSD, which can have better system performance. , but currently Raspberry Pi 4 does not have native booting support from USB (there is a beta), fortunately, a high-level player has made a BerryBoot, which can realize this booting method.
It's just that the theoretical operation is easy to understand, but in actual installation, I have encountered a problem that BerryBoot does not support the official OS firmware, and it will prompt that SquashFS is not supported. The solution is to convert the original img file, but our company's network may be somewhat The problem is that kpartx related files cannot be installed in Raspberry Pi OS, and it cannot be converted into usable firmware, so it has to be tossed.
Then there is overclocking. According to the tests of other players, it is very easy to overclock the CPU of the Raspberry Pi 4 SoC to a full-core 2.0GHz when the power supply and heat dissipation are sufficient. A little surprise, I found that PC DIY players My favorite foreign media, tomshardware, actually published a Raspberry Pi overclocking tutorial, but now there is an easier way to overclock. Some players have built a CammanderPi with a graphical interface, and you can overclock with a few clicks on it. It's just that when I installed this software, I also encountered the above situation that I couldn't connect to the Raspberry server, so I didn't overclock for the time being (mainly because I wanted to write this article first).
Well, after all, I am still a starter (rookie), but tossing and learning is also a great fun of this product, so there will be new progress and new gameplay in the future, and then update this article. What I can share at the moment is These, of course, if you are also interested in this, you can also communicate with each other.
2020/08/09 Update: It turns out that it is not the network that is not working, but that the default source connection of Raspian is too slow. Now I have replaced it with the domestic USTC source, and I can apt update smoothly.
Overclocked to 2.1GHz CPU, 750MHz GPU, stable operation.
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