Earlier in the week I wrote a blog post about how I set up my Office display using a Raspberry Pi 3B+
Today I picked up a Pi 4 and a Pi Zero 2 W for other projects (watch this space!) and I was curious how they’d perform. So I raced them. From the time I press the “power on” button on my TV remote to the time they’re displaying a webpage.
| Device | Time |
| Raspberry Pi 3B+ | 1:05 |
| Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W | 1:25 (+20 secs) |
| Raspberry Pi 4B (4gb) | 0:49 (-16 secs) |
This is not super-scientific. I think the 3B+ is usually faster except it took longer than usual to obtain an IP address during its boot process. đ¤ˇđťââď¸
What was most interesting to me was the differences between the 3B+ and the Zero 2W: the initial parts of the Zero’s boot process were quicker than the 3B+, but as soon as it got into dealing with graphics and opening the browser it slowed down dramatically. Even changing from one screen to another in my dashboard and reloading page elements were slow enough that I would need to change my dashboard layout. It really wasn’t performant enough for what I’m doing.
The Pi 4, unsurprisingly, performed great – although the difference between the 3B+ and the 4 wasn’t as big as I thought it would be. The Pi 4 is also too power hungry to be powered by my TV’s USB port, which is a really nice feature of my setup.
Whether by luck or judgement, the setup I have is the one I’d recommend if you want to do something similar. I’m almost tempted to buy more Pi 3s in case I want to replicate it somewhere else in the house.