On 29/06/2019 09:42, James Harris wrote:
>
> How, er, fast does it go?
>
> With some of the amazing specs of the Raspberry Pi 4 I wonder if the 4GB
version would be fast enough to replace a desktop PC - just for basic computing
such as web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets, file handing etc.
>
> I ask because I have just been trying to use Twitter via Chromium on a
Raspberry Pi 2 running Raspbian and Twitter was unusable. Half the tweet could
be typed before any characters became visible and clicks within the text would
take a while to move 
the cursor.
>
> So what do you guys think about how fast a 4GB RPi 4 would be in comparison?
>

Hi I've just tried using a Pi 4 4GB under Raspbian. The answer is that
whilst it is undoubtedly very impressive it isn't good enough for a
general purpose desktop.


The good:

* Chromium browsing not featuring video was good. Perhaps a bit slow but
not annoyingly so.
* vlc could play x264 video perfectly at 1080p, at about 5% cpu.
* Generally apps/windows opened at an OK speed.

The bad:

* vlc was poor at playing x265 at 1080p, jerky, 50% cpu and about 30%
dropped frames.
* Youtube video was awful, slow, jerky. As were other, popular, free
video Streaming sites.
* Amazon Video wouldn't play at all due to chromium not being a
supported browser.
* LibreOffice Calc gave painfully slow scrolling, on a sheet with 365
rows and 26 columns.

General comments. The main problem seems to be applications lacking
support for hardware video decoding and maybe also a lack of GPU
support. In particular Chromium doesn't seem to be doing video efficiently.

So I will use this Pi as a server rather than a desktop.

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