Raspberry Pi 3B+ versus Raspberry Pi 4B Which One Should I Buy

Raspberry Pi foundation provides a wide range of Raspberry Pi models, picking up the one that is best for you will never come easy as every model has its own pluses and minuses. There is a very heated debate going on these days over whether Raspberry Pi 3B+ would be better or Raspberry Pi 4B? Obviously, the Pi 4 wins as it is a higher spec model with bigger RAM and efficient processor. To have a better picture on all the relevant aspects that decide which one is best, you must get a detailed comparison between the two which is given in this guide.

Raspberry Pi 3B+ versus Raspberry Pi 4B

Before comparing both models based on different benchmark scores, let’s have a look on the specification of both side by side as this will rather make the comparison more straight forward:

Specification	Raspberry Pi 3B+	Raspberry Pi 4B
RAM	1GB	2GB, 4GB, 8GB
Processor	4x Cortex-A53 1.4 GHz	4x Cortex-A72 1.5 Ghz (Or 1.8Ghz on recent models
Bluetooth	4.2 LS	5.0
USB Ports	4×2.0 ports	2×3.0 ports and 2×2.0 ports
Power supply port	Micro USB	Type-C port
HDMI	1x HDMI port	2x HDMI ports
GPU	Broadcom IV @ 400 MHz	Broadcom IV @ 400 MHz
Idle power consumption	459mA	600mA

The above-mentioned specifications are those which are different in both the rest are the same, from the above you clearly see that Raspberry Pi 4B is certainly a better choice. Now to further see how both the models perform practically let’s discuss some benchmark scores for different tasks.

Boot Time

The first query that comes to one’s mind when looking for a suitable Raspberry model is how much time will it take to boot up. The time might vary if you are using an SD card or USB to boot your Pi, the Pi 3B+ took about 35 seconds with SD card and 56 seconds with USB. Whereas Pi 4B took about 30 seconds using SD card and about 36 seconds while using USB. So, from the result you can conclude that Pi 4 is faster though there is not much of a difference since the RAM of Pi 4B is quite high.

Browsing Speed

If you are interested in using Raspberry Pi as your minicomputer to carry out simpler tasks which might include web browsing then you should see the scores for that as well. The speedometer is a software available online that tests the browsing speed, and it gave the Pi 3B+ a score of 4.3 and a score of 11.5 for the Pi 4B. Such results show that Pi 4B has much better browsing speed as compared to the Pi 3B+ which again is a win for Pi 4B.

Network Speed

Another thing to look for when selecting the suitable model for Raspberry Pi is the network speed that Raspberry Pi can accommodate. Since the specification is quite like both the Pi models in this regard but still there are differences in the performance.

The Pi 3B+ reached maximum speed up to 44 megabits per second using the Wi-Fi speed and 150 megabits per second while using the Ethernet speed. Whereas Pi 4B achieved almost 300 megabits per second using the ethernet and 50 megabits per second using the Wi-Fi. Although the difference is not much, still you can see that it can handle high network speed.

Note: All the tests conducted for Pi 4B having 4 GB RAM and P3 B+ having 1 GB RAM.

Conclusion

Raspberry Pi is a quite better choice if you are looking for creating projects or learning programming especially Python language. There are various models of Raspberry Pi available in the market but every model has its different specification. Based on the specifications and benchmark scores Raspberry Pi model 4B is a much better choice in every aspect.