Raspberry Pi 400 - the Most Significant Computer in 2020

Is that a click-bait title?!
I don't think so. While Raspberry Pis were doing well over the years. There never was an attempt to creating a breakthrough by the RPi-foundation. At least that's my thought on things. 
Personally, I was never really attracted to their devices, until the RPi3B+ was released. Now we are talking. Not perfect yet, however, the device was boot-able over USB and with 1GB of RAM, this has beaten many of my previous Linux machines.

With the RPi 4 coming in, the game changed. Now we are talking about a tiny computer that boots from USB3, adding the speed needed for real computing.
In fact, I used a RPi4-8GB in a 64bit computing environment successfully.

The before mentioned setup required some pain and suffering to set up, in particular choosing the 64bit OS that supports the 8GB. So, is that what I would recommend to others? No it is not, only if you know your ways around Linux and stuff. Many of the amenities you get with a 32bit Raspberry Pi OS wont be there. Lets wait and see how the 64bit Raspberry Pi OS will perform, once it left the beta stage.

So, what the fuzz about the RPi 400 then? Well, it is not much of an improvement over the RPi4 to be honest. However, having the only choice of a 4GB version eliminates the need for a 64bit OS. Consequently, the Raspberry Pi OS is all you might want to use.
And that is what I am running on my machine, which I actually use for business, believe it or not. I wished the keyboard was a little bit better, but for the rest, the RPi 400 does a fine job.

To add something technical here, I did overclock my RPi 400 to 2.1GHz by adding the following lines to the file /boot/config.txt (I left the original comment line for reference): 

#uncomment to overclock the arm. 700 MHz is the default.
over_voltage=6
arm_freq=2100
gpu_freq=750

And here we go, this change makes the RPi 400 just a little bit snappier.

Here is another suggestion I got for you: install zram-tools. This will setup virtual swap space using compression in RAM rather than real disk/SSD-space. With 4 cores and 4GB of RAM, zram-tools will provide 1GB of virtual swap. This may not sound like much, however, once you hit the memory ceiling, you will see that this is a really good tool, in particular with higher clock speeds.

Should you consider using the RPi 400 as a daily driver, I highly recommend using an SSD on one of the USB3 ports. Further, a (powered) USB(3) hub will help to add devices you would regularly use for daily work, such as a scanner.

Writing about scanners, I am using an old Canon LIDE 30 with great success on an even older powered USB hub. To be honest, before using those things with the RPi 400, I considered discarding those devices, due to a lack of drivers on OS other than Linux.

And the best thing about the RPi 400, it is passively cooled. As long as you are not using a mechanical HDD with the device, you got a totally silent working environment, which to me means a lot.

 

Overclocking long term experience

To be frank, I am no gamer. In my life, there is no enhanced need of a high performance, super fast machine. However, I wish to have a PC, let's call it workstation, which is responsive at average use.

In a previous post, I took overclocking my hackintosh to the extreme, i.e. the last point in which the workstation still was able to properly boot and run cinebench. Those settings were reached by slowly bringing up all the clocks during one session. Meaning, at the beginning everything was cold, but during tempering, the system was at an upper operation temperature.
The same settings, which worked nicely with a warm system, cause the workstation to cease up when I tried to boot it after cooling down, i.e. the next day. This 5.x GHz clock was a bit too much for my humble Core i5-3570k when cold. Probably drawing too much DC-power.

For daily business, I backed off from those super intense setting, playing it safe with the following parameters:

• basic CPU clock speed: 4.4GHz
• one core active: 4.8GHz
• two cores active: 4.7GHz
• three cores active: 4.6GHz
• four cores active: 4.5GHz

In addition the RAM is overclocked from 1.6GHz (stock) to 1.8GHz.

Compared to the standard settings 3.4GHz base clock speed, with unlocked speeds up to 3.8GHz, the workstation is much snappier now.
The temperatures are moderate, no increase worth to be mentioned.
Some experimentation took place with the DDR3 clock speed. When going too high, the computer would not boot up. However, for the rest, I am not sure if overclocking adds anything to the performance. Also, overclocked or not, the temperature of those ginormous DDR3 heat sinks did not change at all. Anyways I am not sure why industry presently presents us with those huge heat sinks, or even water cooling, for DDR3-RAM... but this is another topic all together.

Overclocking the Hack

Sunday, July 7, 2013

Overclocking the Hack

By now I am building Hackintosh setups for years. In the past, I was sticking to what the average user would be doing, happy to see my hackintosh doing what I want it to do.

With my present "production" hackintosh, yes, I do own the licenses, i.e. bought the DVD, thing are different. This particular build (i5-3570k) opens the possibility to overclock... and this is exactly what I am describing in this post.

The Hackintosh I am using is built in a BitFenix prodigy (white), I is equipped with an Antec Kühler 620 closed water cooling system and 1.6GHz DDR3 RAM. Speaking of the cooling system, the fan provided by Antec was too noisy for my taste, hence, I used the back fan provided by BitFenix for the radiator.

This blog is about overclocking... now that you know the baseline, let's talk about overclocking!

After some experimentation, I came up with the following parameters:

Base clock frequency: 109MHz
CPU clock ratio: 46 - resulting in a CPU clock of 5.01GHz
RAM clock at 1.744GHz (the RAM I am using being rated at 1.6GHZ)
Cinebench (on OS-X) reports a CPU score of 5.84 pts


CPU temperatures, running SETI@home at full cpu power, stayed below 50C.

Mind you, I am running a water cooled system! Overclocking from 3.80GHz to 5GHz is not nothing...