Raspberry Pi 3B

> Is it at all possible to run 1080p video using Pi Zero 2 W smoothly with no jittering? Yes, I think so. With strong caveats. I used a Pi 3b as the primary video player for local media in my living room for a few years, starting a decade or so ago when that was the new hotness. The Pi Zero 2W is the same thing except with less IO and a somewhat-slower clock speed (but it can be overclocked to match the 3b). I just put an appropriate build of Kodi on an SD card, booted it up like an appliance, pointed it at my network share, and used it. The performance was proper for the time doing this in lets-sit-down-and-watch-a-movie mode. It was generally flawless with 1080p h.264 and lesser formats. It was not so good with h.265/HEVC, but that wasn't as common back then as it is today. I was very pleased when I picked up a Pi 4 for this role once that came 'round. It does a very fine job with all of my 1080p media on my old dumb TV, including h.265 (which it has a hardware decoder for). > What about launching a browser and playing a 1080p video from a streaming site? No, not in my experience. There may be an incantation that I don't know, but I have not had very good success with these devices with browser-based streaming media. They have, for me, been resolutely disappointing in this role. I blame gaps in the video driver/X11/browser stack, but I haven't ever wanted to go very deep into this particular rabbit hole. > I am looking for a computer to connect to my internet-discon…

I have a bunch of old Rpi 3B's in a 19" 1RU rack space i use for toy clustering. PoE splitters from a PoE switch to power them which also provides the network uplink. All very neat and self contained and when it comes times to upgrade/replace if they all fail (i have a couple of spares) I can just pull out the 1RU for disposal. Intel NUC's are probably much better value for money these days but the 3B's were pretty cheap at the time I bought them.

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (512MB) and Pi3B (1G) are both still super cheap if you can cope with that much RAM.

I think the Pi 3 range is a sweet spot for low cost, low power draw, decent-enough CPU. Newer models draw increasingly more power; going from 1.4W to 2.8W may not seem like much, but that's half your battery life. There's a few differences in Raspberry Pi 3 versions that may lead you to buy one or the other: - The Pi 3B has 10/100 Ethernet, 802.11n (single-band) WiFi, Bluetooth 4.1. Power idled at 1.4W and peaked at 3.7W. - The Pi 3B+ removed the 10/100 Ethernet in favor of USB Ethernet (~300Mbps w/USB2.0). CPU cores were overclocked from 1.2GHz to 1.4GHz (so a heatsink is more necessary), with ~15% increase in benchmark performance. It added 802.11ac (dual band) WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2 w/BLE. Power idled at 1.9W and peaked at 5.1W. This is also the only 3-model supporting PoE (w/ extra HAT). - The Pi 3A+ removed Ethernet and reduced USB to a single port. The RAM was reduced from 1GB to 512MB. Power idled at 1.13W and peaked at 4.1W. The A+ form factor is more compact. Overall the 3A+ is smaller, cheaper, and less power draw than the 3B+ (but not as low as the 3B). The lowest power draw with acceptable performance is the 3B . For slightly more power draw and more CPU performance, go with 3A+ . For "everything" (including PoE) the 3B+ is it. If you want the 3A+ but don't need the video, want a smaller form factor, and half the power draw, the Pi Zero 2 W is it. Though the Pi Zero 2 W is supposed to be cheapest, due to demand it's often sold out or more exp…

Ahah thanks, yeah if you don’t need 400 cores, why have them? I mean, sometimes you need power but if you don’t need it, is better to have a slightly older hardware, but more reliable and, above all, with less consumptions/environment-bills impact. In example: I’m using at home a RaspberryPI 4B as a Pi-Hole that is a totally waste of power, I’ve installed the same sistem in some companies with 70/80 DNS clients and all is running more than fine …but on a Raspberry PI 3B!