Raspberry Pi 400 review—the under-$100 desktop PC you didn’t know you needed

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  Fully unboxed, we see the Pi 400 itself, a 247-page, full-color beginner's guide, power supply, USB mouse, and one micro-HDMI-to-HDMI cable. [credit: Jim Salter ]

Late Friday afternoon, I got an exciting SMS notification—my review sample of the new Raspberry Pi 400 had arrived. I learned of the new Pi model last week while interviewing Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton and Canonical desktop engineering director Martin Wimpress about Ubuntu 20.10's newly improved desktop support for the Pi hardware family.

In brief, the Pi 400 is a slightly faster version of the 4GiB Pi 4 which ships preassembled in a small, wedge-shaped chassis with integrated keyboard. The new model directly targets desktop replacement use and can be purchased solo for $70 or as a full kit (as seen above) for $100.

The new form factor—which has apparently been in the works ever since the introduction of the official Raspberry Pi keyboard—addresses and enthusiastically supports the Pi 4's growing use case as a replacement or alternative for the traditional desktop PC. Upton told Ars that the Pi 400 is about 20 percent faster than the Pi 4; it has largely the same components under the hood but on a differently laid-out board, and its BCM2711 CPU is clocked a touch higher than the BCM2711 in the Pi 4.

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