I updated to the new 8 GiB board.
It booted without any problems:
|
| RPi4B showing 8GB of RAM |
“But, there is nothing like a free lunch,” I thought. “What about power consumption?”
I fired up my ELV EA 8000 power meter and compared the new system to the old one. By system I mean
- the Paspberry Pi official USB-C power supply,
- the RPi4 board,
- an X825 expansion board (for SATA),
- a 256 GB SLC SSD (Super Talent FTM25JB25I), and
- a 1 GB ethernet connection.
The headless system booted from SD-card and the root file system is on the SSD. For the measurement, the system was idling.
Because the EA 8000 has no interface and the display updates every second, I recorded it with a webcam for a minute, took stills every second (with ffmpeg), and typed the values
into text files.
|
| Power consumption as a function of time |
| RAM Size [GB] | Power Consumption [W] |
|---|---|
| 4 | 4.7177 ± 0.0007 |
| 8 | 4.2309 ± 0.0010 |
Of course, the “±” values do not represent the precision of the measurement. For that, the EA 8000 is not precise enough. However, they denote the standard deviation of the mean value of the measurement. This means that though spending 4 GB of RAM the board designers have lowered the input power by almost 0.5 W.
