Teardown of the newly released Raspberry Pi 400

The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently released the Raspberry Pi 400. This product is essentially a computer with a Raspberry Pi motherboard integrated into the keyboard casing.

Of course, it does not simply encapsulate the Raspberry Pi 4B, for which the manufacturer redesigned the circuit and PCB.

All you need is an HDMI cable, a 5V power adapter, a mouse, and a monitor, and the Raspberry Pi 400 becomes a standard desktop computer.

From the front, the Raspberry Pi 400 is basically the same as the previous official Raspberry Pi keyboard, the only difference is that the F10 scroll lock key is now a power key, and the scroll lock indicator is now a power/activity indicator .




On the side, the Raspberry Pi 400 has more interfaces. There are two USB 3.0, one USB 2.0, two micro HDMI ports that support 4K60 output, a Gigabit LAN (now supports PoE), a USB-C for power supply, and importantly, a 40pin GPIO port.






dismantling
The Raspberry Pi 400 doesn't have any screws or other fasteners on the bottom, and the difference from a normal keyboard is some vents and larger rubber feet.



Unplug the keyboard and the motherboard connector, we first notice this huge heat sink, there is a small conductive pad in the upper left corner, connecting the Ethernet socket, heat sink and keyboard.



Next, we remove the four screws that secure the heat sink. This step requires rocking back and forth as you pull it up, as it's attached to the Broadcom SoC chip with a very sticky thermal pad.



After taking out the radiator, you can see the design difference between the Raspberry Pi 400 and the Raspberry Pi 4B.



The back of the motherboard of the Raspberry Pi 400 does not have too many components, so it is very simple.



The Raspberry Pi 400 uses the same PCB antenna as on other WiFi-enabled Raspberry Pis for WiFi, no external components, a pretty nice little antenna.
 

performance
The Raspberry Pi 400 supports the Raspberry Pi desktop operating system, as well as third-party Linux distributions such as Debian and Ubuntu.

In terms of specifications, the Raspberry Pi 400 uses a quad-core 64-bit@1.8GHz ARM Cortex-A72 processor similar to the Raspberry Pi 4, supplemented by 4GB RAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.1 (Bluetooth Low Energy), and Gigabit Ethernet.

The parameters of the Raspberry Pi 400 have not changed much, and the frequency has been increased to 1.8 GHz compared to the 1.5 GHz of the Raspberry Pi 4B. Thanks to this giant heatsink, some enthusiasts have successfully overclocked it to 2.2 GHz, and after running it for a few hours, it is still stable.

Epilogue
The original intention of the Raspberry Pi Foundation was indeed to bring programmable computers into the hands of people at a very low cost.
Unexpectedly, the actual situation and their original intention "deviate", which directly detonated the MAKER market...
Since the first version of the Raspberry Pi was released, the Raspberry Pi has been used in a variety of dazzling scenarios, even in the industrial and commercial fields.

With the release of the Raspberry Pi 400, we saw a lot of discussions about "the Raspberry Pi 400 went wrong". Similar to the conclusion we came to in the previous post "How about unplugging the MacBook and using the 8GB Raspberry Pi to work?":

If we want to completely replace the computers we usually use with the Raspberry Pi 400, it is not enough for the time being. But for some, the Raspberry Pi 400 has its unique advantages.

Raspberry Pi 400 has a high performance ratio (only 5V power supply is required), and it is small and convenient. It is a good choice for some friends who only need to browse the web, edit documents, deal with emails, browse social media, and maybe even do some light photo or video organization.



The Raspberry Pi 400 is also ideal for educational applications. As the official website says:

The Raspberry Pi 400 is the perfect educational tool for students of all ages. It's low-cost, portable, and ideal for home study and for teaching computing concepts like programming, physical computing, and networking.

As your child's first computer to learn programming or Linux system, the Raspberry Pi 400 is a very good choice.