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Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+:
An insider’s guide
By Nick Heath
COPYRIGHT ©2018 CBS INTERACTIVE INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

RASPBERRY PI 3 MODEL B+: AN INSIDER’S GUIDE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
03 Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ review: Hands-on with the new board

12 Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+: Co-creator Eben Upton reveals all about
the new board
17 Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+: A cheat sheet
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RASPBERRY PI 3 MODEL B+ REVIEW:

HANDS-ON WITH THE NEW BOARD
The Raspberry Pi is the little computer that could.
Selling for just $35, the UK-made machine has become something of a phenomenon, selling close to 18 million
boards since the first Pi was released in 2012.
March 14, 2018, saw the release of the most powerful Pi yet, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+. The B+ takes the
2016 Pi 3 Model B and ups the processing power and Wi-Fi speeds, alongside some other minor tweaks—all of
which are outlined in detail below.
First impressions of the B+ are great. On launch, using a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ with the official Raspbian OS
offers a noticeably better experience than using a Raspberry Pi 3 on day one, partly as a result of the B+’s extra
power, but also due to improvements to the Raspbian OS in the intervening years.
IMAGE: RASPBERRY PI FOUNDATION
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In testing, listed at the bottom of the review, the boost to

processing power was evident—from better performance in The impression is of a
benchmarks to the faster data transfer when copying from computer that comes
USB. Another bonus is the board’s co-creator Eben Upton
admirably close to offering
says that the processor should be less likely to throttle its
performance under heavy load—thanks to a heatspreader on a comparable experience
top of the CPU. For me, the only tests that failed to show to using a modern PC at a
off the board’s capabilities measured wired and wireless
fraction of the price.
connectivity—with the B+ not really distinguishing itself
from the Raspberry Pi 3 despite its superior specs.
The Pi’s official Raspbian OS is snappy and simple to use, booting to a windowed desktop with a corner menu
that should look familiar to anyone who’s used a PC in the past 20 years. Wi-Fi and wired internet connected
without issue and software is bundled for everyday uses—from the Chromium web browser to the
LibreOffice suite.
While there was a slight delay when loading heavier web pages that use a lot of scripts or video, I found delays
to be minor and nothing that really interfered with my ability to browse those sites. The only anomaly I noticed
was that some autoplaying videos didn’t seem to load, although this may be a plus in many people’s eyes.
When it came to work, Gmail or Google Docs loaded in the Chromium browser without issue, with only a very
slight delay in opening messages compared to a modern PC.
For streaming video, after updating the OS I found YouTube playback of video at 1080 resolution and below
to be smooth. The Pi seemed to struggle with the higher bitrate required for 720 and 1080 streams at 60 frames
per second. However, the video wasn’t jerky, instead playing smoothly in chunks of a few seconds before
buffering to load in the next section, so uninterrupted smooth playback might be possible with a few tweaks.
Similarly, 3D gaming performance is solid in older titles like Quake III, although pretty much the same as
offered by the vanilla Pi 3.
The OS itself is very responsive, rapidly opening menus and software and moving and resizing windows
without any noticeable lag.
The impression is of a computer that comes admirably close to offering a comparable experience to using a
modern PC at a fraction of the price. Of course, opening a stack of browser tabs and alt-tabbing between
multiple applications risks overloading the Pi’s 1GB of memory, and this isn’t a machine for heavy photo or
video editing, but if you’re sensible about how you use the Pi it’s not going to get in your way.
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That said, each person’s tolerance differs, and many of us have been somewhat spoiled by the responsiveness
of modern PCs, so it could be that over time even the trivial delays you will experience when browsing the web
using the Pi 3 B+ would start to wear your patience down. For the short time I was using the Pi however, I
found it to be relatively painless, and certainly better than earlier releases of the board.
Where Raspbian sets itself apart from competing OSes is in its bundled educational tools. The point of the
Pi is to encourage people to learn about how hardware and software work, and it doesn’t disappoint. The OS
is stocked with software for learning and practicing programming—including IDEs for the Python and Java
programming languages, and for piecing together Internet of Things appliances using Node.js. For those
who want to tinker with making their own gadgets, the Pi 3 B+, like its predecessors, offers a 40-pin header,
including 26 general-purpose input output (GPIO) pins, which provide a way for the Pi to be hooked to and
interact with other electronics, like sensors, lights, and other boards. For beginners there is the drag-and-drop
coding tool Scratch, which provides a simple introduction to programming concepts, such as assigning
values to variables and control flow, and Minecraft Pi Edition, which allows user-written scripts to be used to
manipulate the game.
As a package, the Pi 3 B+ is pretty remarkable. Yes, it may not be vastly different from the Pi 3 on paper, but
the combined effect of the tweaks to the hardware and improvements to the official Raspbian OS over the
years is delivering a computer that feels like it could cost several times the price tag. That’s without mentioning
the Pi’s ace in the hole: the plethora of operating systems, software, tutorials, projects, and hardware add-ons
that are available for the family of boards.
It all adds up to a remarkably versatile computer that also serves as a decent PC, all for less than the cost of a
tank of gas. The bang you get for your buck in 2018 is pretty amazing, and what’s even more impressive is that
it’s only going to get better.
HARDWARE IMPROVEMENTS FROM THE PI 3 TO PI 3 B+

Faster CPU
The Pi 3 Model B+ is based on the same quad-core, 64-bit processor as the Pi 3 Model B. Like the Model B,
the B+’s is based on an Arm Cortex A53 architecture. However, the B+ ups the speed of the CPU to 1.4GHz
from 1.2GHz in the original Model B, an increase of about 15%.
Faster Wi-Fi
While the original Model B supported only 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, the Model B+ has a dual-band wireless antenna,
supporting 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11 b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi.
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The 5GHz 802.11ac Wi-Fi offers a maximum throughput of 1.3Gbps, almost three times the maximum
throughput of 2.4GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi found on the Pi 3 Model B. However, I was unable to achieve a
significant improvement in throughput in my testing below.
The B+ also offers support for Bluetooth 4.2, an improvement over the 4.1 support found in the Pi 3 Model B.
Faster wired Ethernet

On top of the Wi-Fi upgrade, the wired internet also has a speed bump, courtesy of the board’s new Gigabit
Ethernet over USB 2.0 bridge, which ups the maximum throughput to about 300Mbps.
Another plus for those using the Pi with a wired Ethernet connection is the inclusion of support for a Power
Over Ethernet [POE] Hardware Attached on Top [HAT] board, which will add the ability for the Ethernet
cable to power the board.
HOW DOES THE RASPBERRY PI 3 MODEL B+ COMPARE TO

EARLIER PI BOARDS?
General performance
Sysbench is another measure of general CPU performance—here showing single-core and multi-core
performance of various generations of Pi boards.
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The Dhrystone benchmark measures the general performance of the CPU, focusing on how it handles
calculations using integers.
The Whetstone benchmark measures another aspect of processor performance, this time how it handles
floating-point calculations.
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The Linpack test also measures how rapidly a machine can handle floating-point calculations. The latest version
of the benchmark is used to compile the list of the fastest supercomputers in the world.
While compiling code into an executable program isn’t a common activity for most people, the Pi is aimed at
helping people learn about computers. Here’s how long it took to build the Quake III code from
this GitHub repo.
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Connectivity
This iPerf benchmark measures the speed of data transfer between two computers—in this case, between an
Ethernet-wired Ubuntu laptop and a Pi 3 Model B+, a Wi-Fi connected Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and Pi Zero
W, as well as an Ethernet-linked Pi 1. These figures are not meant to be absolute measures, since network speed
can be affected by so many local factors, but they offer an indication of relative performance.
In these tests I was unable to achieve the sorts of data throughput the B+ should achieve on paper. If I’m able
to resolve these issues I’ll update the review.
Web browsing
The Octane benchmark reveals how the Chromium browser in the Pi’s default Raspbian OS handles JavaScript,
the default scripting language of the web.
The results highlight both the additional power of the B+ and the improvements of the Chromium browser
over the Epiphany browser in the OS that the Pi 3 launched with. JavaScript is at the core of the modern
web, with heavy pages loading in tens of scripts that in turn fetch more JavaScript. If your browser is slow at
JavaScript, it’s slow full-stop.
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3D graphics
To measure 3D performance we ran the first person shooter Quake III, using the standard ‘timedemo’ at
1920×1080 resolution and settings set to high geometric, maximum texture detail, 32-bit texture quality, and
trilinear filtering.
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Data transfer
Shown is how long it took to
transfer a 1.3GB Raspbian
img file from the Pi’s microSD
storage to an attached 16GB
USB stick.
RASPBERRY PI
MODEL 3 B+ SPECS
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RASPBERRY PI 3 MODEL B+:

CO-CREATOR EBEN UPTON REVEALS
ALL ABOUT THE NEW BOARD
In 2016, Eben Upton, the co-creator of the multi- “If you have 15 percent more
million selling $35 Raspberry Pi, said there was
little more power that could be wrung from the
CPU, a bunch more network,
tiny computer. and better thermals, then all of
It turns out there was more untapped potential in a sudden things that just about
the board than first thought, as the Raspberry Pi worked and were marginal
Foundation just released the Raspberry Pi 3 Model
become very comfortable on
B+.
the platform.”
Upton describes the board as kind of a Raspberry
Pi 3.5, not a generational leap over the 2016’s Pi 3 but a step up that delivers a decent boost to performance
and Wi-Fi speeds.
The headline improvements to the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ are that the CPU has been overclocked to
1.4GHz—a leap of about 15%—and the addition of 802.11ac Wi-Fi, which almost triples the maximum
throughput of the Pi 3 Model B’s 2.4GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi—while the price remains at $35.
“It’s not a Raspberry Pi 4. I think what we’ve ended up with is something which is a really good B+, a bit too
good for a B+, but that would be not really anywhere near enough for a Raspberry Pi 4,” Upton said.
“The B+ is our attention to detail spin for the product, where we take all the stuff we’ve learned in the past
couple of years and smoosh it all together and make a new thing that addresses some of the concerns or takes
advantage of some of the opportunities that have come along in the intervening time.”
The B+ will be of particular interest to enthusiasts pushing the existing Pi 3 to its limits, Upton said, giving
them the overhead to try out new things with the Raspberry Pi.
“If you have 15 percent more CPU, a bunch more network, and better thermals, then all of a sudden things
that just about worked and were marginal become very comfortable on the platform.”
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The good news for those wanting to see how

far they can push the new Pi 3 B+ is that its
CPU is less prone to throttling its speed when
under prolonged heavy load, thanks to a new
heatspreader on top of the chip.
“While you still can, if you run a completely

insane benchmark, it’s much harder to push a Pi
3 B+ into thermal limits than it is a Pi 3.”
Those new uses could include a more capable

media center, with the B+ able to comfortably
play a wider range of video due to its
better performance and recent support for
hardware-assisted decoding of HDCP-encrypted 1080p H.265 video. The power bump could also broaden the
Pi’s use in running machine-learning models, Upton said, citing this Pi-powered cucumber sorter as one of his
favorite uses of AI on the board to date.
The B+ will also make for a better home server than the vanilla Pi 3, thanks to its improved data transfer. The
addition of 802.11ac Wi-Fi support effectively doubles wireless throughput to 1.3Gb/s, while the addition of
Gigabit Ethernet over USB 2.0 ups the maximum wired throughput to about 300 Mb/s, more than double
what was previously possible.
The USB and Ethernet share the same data bus, so you won’t be able to sustain full Gigabit Ethernet speeds.
But Upton said it offers a “noticeable improvement in a lot of use cases”. Another plus for those using the
Pi with a wired Ethernet connection is the inclusion of support for a Power Over Ethernet [POE] Hardware
Attached on Top [HAT] board, which will add the ability for the Ethernet cable to power the board.
NEW OPERATING SYSTEMS AND FULL WINDOWS 10

The Pi already runs a plethora of Linux-based operating systems and desktops, and the extra reserves in the
B+’s tank should help widen the range of viable choices.
“Like I say, everyone gets a shot in the arm. We like the Ubuntu stuff, that’s been very popular, the Fedora guys
have done some great work recently. Every little bit helps,” Upton said.
And while the release doesn’t expand on the Windows 10 offerings for the Pi, Upton said he would still like
more options for people who want to run traditional x86 Windows apps on the Pi.
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“It’s still something I’d like to see. Those people who want the The release of the Pi
ability to run Microsoft Windows applications, particularly x86
Windows applications, there is a population of those people and
3 B+ doesn’t mean
they’re people we can’t really address at the moment.” the older models
will be taken off the
WHAT’S THE PLAN FOR THE market. All of the
RASPBERRY PI 4? previous generation
Upton originally indicated the Raspberry Pi 4 would be released
around 2019, but he said that given the release of the Pi 3 B+, “I boards will remain on
wonder if this stretches that a little bit”, adding the next major sale, their respective
new board would likely be based around a new system-on-a-chip.
prices remaining
“We’ve found a few extra tricks up our sleeve to get one more
unchanged.
half generation improvement out,” he said.
“It’s pretty obvious that we really are at the process thermal limit now. We can add as many extra transistors as
we want, but in the thermal footprint of the device we can’t afford the tolI.
“I think it’s inevitable that the next thing will have to have some other chipset on it.
“You can safely say by 2021 we’ll likely be shipping a Pi 4, and that’s conservative I hope.
“What’s it going to look like? I think it will look like a Pi 3 but more,” he said, adding that he felt the Pi was
now a feature-complete device following the addition of Wi-Fi with the release of the Pi 3.
The release of the Pi 3 B+ doesn’t mean the older models will be taken off the market. All of the previous
generation boards will remain on sale, their respective prices remaining unchanged.
While that may seem counterintuitive, Upton said it makes sense to keep the prices the same, as while the
earlier generation boards are cheaper to make, diminishing demand means the cost remains fairly static.
While the vast majority of existing Pi cases and add-ons will be compatible with the new Pi 3 B+, the addition
of a keep-out on the bottom of 4-pins that add support for the POE HAT, and the new heatsink on the CPU
means some will no longer fit—although Upton said no more than a handful will be affected. Probably the
most widely used case likely to be affected will be the Flirc series, which may contact the heatsink on top of
the chip.
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The good news for owners of existing Pi boards is that the Raspberry Pi Foundation has committed that no Pi
board will hit End of Life until 2022, with a commitment to produce the Pi 3 B+ until at least January 2023.
18 MILLION BOARDS AND COUNTING

The Pi has proved to be somewhat unstoppable, selling more than 18 million boards since its launch in 2012,
and with that momentum showing little sign of slowing down.
“Hopefully we’ll go past the 20 million point in the first half of this year, with luck,” Upton said. “It’s a lovely
number you know. It’s a long way from 1,000 right?”—a nod to the foundation’s rather conservative expec-
tation of how many boards they would sell.
Money from sales of the Pi are ploughed back into the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a registered charity whose
aim is to encourage more people to learn about computing by making low-cost computers widely available.
Today the foundation, and Raspberry Pi Trading, which handles engineering and sales of the boards, employ
about 120 people, and the foundation’s education outreach is helping some 100,000 children each week.
Beyond the educational success, Upton takes some pleasure in helping to drive the cost of computing down to
the point where an actually useful machine could be bought for less than a tank of gas.
“What’s really nice is that before we started doing this there weren’t these little boards for under $100. Now
there’s lots of stuff for under $100 and people are exploring lots of price-performance-quality points.”
It’s a testament to the success of the Pi just how many of these rival boards sport similarly fruity names, from
Orange to Banana Pi.
However, Upton said he’s yet to see a board that hits the same balance between price and performance offered
by the Raspberry Pi.
“I haven’t seen anything that makes me think ‘Wow, I wish I built that’. There’s no one who’s landed on a point
in that multi-dimensional space that I wish I got to first. I think we’re still building the product that I and the
other people in this office would buy ourselves, and that’s been a big thing for us.”
The release of the Pi 3 B+ will likely drive a fresh spike in Pi sales, even if Upton and his colleagues are being
quite modest about the new board.
“We’re being quite British about it and being quite reticent about selling this. It’s an incremental update, it isn’t
Pi 4 right?
“But actually this big stack of incremental upgrades seems to have created something where the people we’ve
sent them out to have been really psyched about it.”
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RASPBERRY PI 3 MODEL B+: A CHEAT

SHEET
Six years since the Raspberry Pi launched, and the runaway success of the tiny $35 computer shows little sign
of slowing down.
March 14, 2018, marks the release of the new flagship in the Pi range, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+.
While it isn’t a generational leap over 2016’s Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, it delivers a welcome boost to the Pi’s
speed and Wi-Fi capabilities. Here’s everything you need to know.
WHAT IS THE RASPBERRY PI 3 MODEL B+?

The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is currently the best Raspberry Pi computer you can buy.
While the price stays at $35, the new board one-ups its predecessor in several ways, most notably with a faster
processor and Wi-Fi.
The co-creator of the board Eben Upton describes it as lying somewhere between the 2016 Raspberry Pi 3 and
a future Raspberry Pi 4 in terms of power and features.
The hardware improvements, along with refinements to the Pi 3 B+’s official Raspbian OS, elevate the board to
the status of a perfectly acceptable everyday PC—impressive for a computer the price of a restaurant meal.
HOW IS THE RASPBERRY PI 3 MODEL B+ BETTER THAN THE

RASPBERRY PI 3 MODEL B?
The B+’s main improvement over the 2016 Raspberry Pi 3 Model B is a boost to processor speed. While the
B+ shares the same quad-core, 64-bit CPU, it has been clocked at 1.4GHz—a 15% increase over the Pi 3
Model B. This improved performance was borne out in TechRepublic tests, where general performance of the
B+ trounced earlier Pi boards.
That extra performance doesn’t come at the cost of stability, either, with a new heatspreader on top of the
CPU helping keep temperatures under control and reducing instances of throttling compared to the Pi 3
Model B.
Connectivity-wise, the board should be capable of streaming data to and from the board more rapidly. A new
dual-band Wi-Fi antenna adds support for 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11 b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi. That 802.11ac Wi-Fi
promises almost triple the maximum throughput of the 802.11n Wi-Fi on the Pi 3 Model B.
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Unfortunately, in initial testing by TechRepublic, the In the six years since the first
speeds achieved fell somewhat short, although others
have achieved much better results. Pi launched, people have
Wired Ethernet performance is also boosted, with found uses for Raspberry
the addition of Gigabit Ethernet over USB 2.0, with Pi boards ranging from
a maximum throughput of about 300Mbps, again
media center to lightweight
substantially more than the Pi 3 Model B.
Another small improvement is the addition of support
general-purpose computer,
for Bluetooth 4.2/BLE, a step up from the Bluetooth and from cheap machine
4.1 support in the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. for prototyping gadgets to
DIY robot brains. The list of
WHAT CAN THE RASPBERRY
projects is endless.
PI 3 MODEL B+ DO?
Upton expects that the additional overhead offered by the B+ could allow the Pi to carry out tasks that were
previously just out of its reach.
For existing Pi users, the B+ will be that little bit better for a wide range of tasks, from a media center able
to play a wider range of video, due to the B+’s better performance and recent support for hardware-assisted
decoding of HDCP-encrypted 1080p H.265 video, to a faster home server, thanks to the connectivity upgrades.
Perhaps the biggest plus point for the B+, like the other boards in the Pi family, is the versatility that comes
from its software, along with the hardware add-ons that can be hooked up to the board’s 40-pin header.
In the six years since the first Pi launched, people have found uses for Raspberry Pi boards ranging from media
center to lightweight general-purpose computer, and from cheap machine for prototyping gadgets to DIY
robot brains. The list of projects is endless.
In that time, the community, operating systems, software, and hardware add-ons for the Pi boards have
continued to grow—to the point that the Pi is far and away the easiest single-board computer to get started
with, due to the stability and breadth of its software and wealth of user-created tutorials.
The Pi and its official Raspbian OS excel when it comes to teaching users about computing. The OS is loaded
with software for learning and practicing programming—including IDEs for the Python and Java programming
languages—and for piecing together Internet of Things appliances using Node.js. For beginners there is the
drag-and-drop coding tool Scratch, which provides a simple introduction to programming concepts, such as
assigning values to variables and control flow, and Minecraft Pi Edition, which allows user-written scripts to be
used to manipulate the game.
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The B+ has the benefit of sharing

these advantages, while also being the
most powerful Pi to date.
That’s not to say the Pi 3 Model

B+ is the most powerful board out
there; there are plenty of other more
powerful single-board computers,
such as the Odroid XU4. But it’s hard
to find a board that strikes the same
price-performance balance as the Pi.
The B+ will be even more versatile

than its predecessors, with the board
supporting a new add-on that provides
Power Over Ethernet [POE] capability, allowing the board to be powered by the Ethernet cable.
The board is also likely to be the last Raspberry Pi upgrade for a little while, as the Raspberry Pi 4 is some
time off.
While Upton has previously spoken about the possibility of a Raspberry Pi 4 in 2019, that date may be pushed
back by the arrival of the B+. At the very latest, however, Upton says he hopes the Pi 4 will be released by
2021, and he says the work they’ve already done to release Pi boards—for example, achieving compliance with
wireless regulations—should help streamline the process of releasing future boards.
But he says he has no interest in rushing out a board that he or his colleagues wouldn’t want to buy themselves,
or that would tarnish the Pi’s reputation.
“You can spam products out into the market very easily, but if you want to put out good products that pack a
lot into a small price point and that you’re sure are going to work it takes time,” he said.
WHO SHOULD BUY THE RASPBERRY PI 3 B+?

With almost 18 million boards sold, there will be no shortage of Raspberry Pi fans queueing up to test the
newcomer to the Pi family.
But Upton believes it is those enthusiasts who were pushing the Pi 3 Model B to its limits who will benefit the
most—due to the increased power and new heatspreader.
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“While you still can if you run a completely insane benchmark, it’s much harder to push a Pi 3 B+ into thermal
limits than it is a Pi 3,” Upton said.
Organizations looking to build the Pi into appliances may also be keen to snap up the B+. The dual-band
wireless LAN comes with a modular compliance certification, allowing the board to be designed into end
products with significantly reduced wireless LAN compliance testing. Upton says this feature should cut cost
and time to market when using the Pi 3 B+ in a product.
WHO ARE THE RASPBERRY PI 3 MODEL B+’S COMPETITORS?

As mentioned it’s difficult to find another single-board computer that hits the price-performance balance
achieved by the B+—at least not without making sacrifices in other areas.
One possible alternative is the $25 Orange Pi Lite2, which has similar specs to the more expensive Raspberry
Pi 3 Model B+, with the same memory, a 64-bit quad-core processor, reasonable GPU, 1GB memory, support
for 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 4.1 support. It even has some advantages over the Pi 3, at least on paper,
such as a single USB 3.0 port and support for Android 7.0. However, it trails the Pi in a couple of respects,
with fewer USB ports, fewer pins for adding hardware to the board, and the lack of Ethernet.
There’s also a rather big downside: In general, Orange Pi board reviews are critical of poor driver support,
missing software, and being stuck with unstable versions of older operating systems. So buy these boards only
if you’re prepared to spend a lot of time trying to get software to work.
For the same price as the B+, $35, the Odroid-C1+ offers broadly the same specs, but adds Gigabit Ethernet.
The C1+ packs a 1.5GHz quad-core Arm-based processor—faster than the Pi 3 but based on a slightly older
architecture: 1GB of DDR3 RAM and the reasonable-for-the-price Mali-450 GPU. But the Odroid does trail
the Pi 3 in one notable respect—missing that board’s Wi-Fi connectivity.
If you’re prepared to wait and to pay a bit more money, Odroid has raised the possibility it will release the
N1 Lite this year, which it anticipates will be a $75 board, with a hexacore processor backed up by 2GB of
memory, two USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, the ability to run Android 7.1 and Ubuntu 18.04, support for
4K displays via HDMI 2.0, and a 40-pin header for connecting hardware.
WHAT ARE THE OTHER RASPBERRY PI BOARDS?

There have been several generations of Raspberry Pi boards released since the launch of the single-board
computer in 2012. The main releases include the Raspberry Pi Model B+, the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, and
the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. However, there have been several spinoff boards, such as the tiny and ultra cheap
Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi Zero W.
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There is also the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 (CM3), which packs the same 1.2GHz, quad-core Broadcom
BCM2837 processor and 1GB memory used on the Pi 3 onto a slimmer and smaller board.
The CM3’s compact design, the same size as a DDR2 small outline dual inline memory module, is suited to
being built into electronic appliances. The original Raspberry Pi Compute Module was used inside various IoT,
home, and factory automation products, as well as a media player.
The plus for owners of earlier Raspberry Pi boards is that there is no sign of official support or software devel-
opment for older boards being dropped for the near future.
The release of the B+ also won’t result in older boards being taken off sale or a change in their pricing. The
B+ will remain in production until at least January 2023.
WILL EXISTING RASPBERRY PI CASES AND ADD-ONS FIT

THE B+?
Most add-ons and cases for older Pi boards should fit the B+.
The biggest problem will be for those hardware add-ons that clash with four pins on the B+ that add support
for a Power over Ethernet add-on, although Upton says this should affect only one or two products.
The most popular Pi case looks like it might struggle to fit the B+, due to pressing down on the top of the
board, but again, most cases and all heatsinks should be fine.
WHEN IS THE RASPBERRY PI 3 MODEL B+ AVAILABLE?

The board is available now from CPC, RS Components, Pi Hut, Pimoroni, Pi Supply, and ModMyPi in the UK,
and Adafruit, Micro Center, element14, PiShop.us, Chicago Electronic Distributors, and CanaKit in the US.
For any other countries, visit this page on the Raspberry Pi Foundation website and you’ll be redirected to the
right stores.
WHAT ARE THE SPECS FOR THE RASPBERRY PI 3

MODEL B+?
• Processor: Broadcom BCM2837B0, quad-core A53 (ARMv8) 64-bit SoC @1.4GHz
• Memory: 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM
• Connectivity: 2.4GHz and 5GHz IEEE 802.11 b/g/n/ac wireless LAN, Bluetooth 4.2, BLE. Gigabit
Ethernet over USB 2.0 (maximum throughput of 300Mbps)
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• USB: 4 x 2.0
• Expandability: Extended 40-pin GPIO header
• Video and sound: 1 x full-size HDMI port, MIPI DSI display port, MIPI CSI camera port, 4 pole stereo
output, and composite video port
• Multimedia: H.264, MPEG-4 decode (1080p30), H.264 encode (1080p30); OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0 graphics
• SD card support: microSD format for OS and data storage
• Input power: 5V/2.5A DC via microUSB connector, 5V DC via GPIO header, Power over Ethernet
(PoE)-enabled (requires separate PoE add-on)
• Environment: Operating temperature 0 - 50C
• Compliance: Local and regional approvals listed here.
• Production lifetime: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ will remain in production until at least January 2023
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Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+:

COPYRIGHT ©2018 CBS INTERACTIVE INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

03 Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ review: Hands-on with the new board

RASPBERRY PI 3 MODEL B+ REVIEW:

IMAGE: RASPBERRY PI FOUNDATION

In testing, listed at the bottom of the review, the boost to

HARDWARE IMPROVEMENTS FROM THE PI 3 TO PI 3 B+

Faster wired Ethernet

HOW DOES THE RASPBERRY PI 3 MODEL B+ COMPARE TO

RASPBERRY PI 3 MODEL B+:

The good news for those wanting to see how

“While you still can, if you run a completely

Those new uses could include a more capable

NEW OPERATING SYSTEMS AND FULL WINDOWS 10

18 MILLION BOARDS AND COUNTING

RASPBERRY PI 3 MODEL B+: A CHEAT

WHAT IS THE RASPBERRY PI 3 MODEL B+?

HOW IS THE RASPBERRY PI 3 MODEL B+ BETTER THAN THE

The B+ has the benefit of sharing

That’s not to say the Pi 3 Model

The B+ will be even more versatile

WHO SHOULD BUY THE RASPBERRY PI 3 B+?

WHO ARE THE RASPBERRY PI 3 MODEL B+’S COMPETITORS?

WHAT ARE THE OTHER RASPBERRY PI BOARDS?

WILL EXISTING RASPBERRY PI CASES AND ADD-ONS FIT

WHEN IS THE RASPBERRY PI 3 MODEL B+ AVAILABLE?

WHAT ARE THE SPECS FOR THE RASPBERRY PI 3

Editor, Australia DISCLAIMER

Associate Social Media Editor

Cover image: Nick Heath

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