There are a lot of circuit board computers around these days. Some are only really meant for IoT devs. Others are Raspberry Pi copies, to put it bluntly. No other circuit board computer touches what the Pi offers as a package.

Great value; Big performance upgrade; Wi-fi is an excellent addition

Not 4K; Plenty of cheap media player rivals

The Raspberry Pi 3 is the latest version of the popular single-board computer aimed at hobbyists and at helping children to gain developer skills. The new model, released just a year after the Raspberry Pi 2, adds built-in wireless capability for the first time and switches to more powerful CPU...

More powerful quad-core processor; WiFi and Bluetooth support; compatible with existing hardware and software

Needs additional hardware and software components to function

On Friday my Raspberry Pi 3 arrived for benchmarking. For our first benchmarks of this Cortex-A53 64-bit ARM $35 development board is a comparison against eight other ARMv7 and ARMv8 development boards running their official Linux distributions while carrying out a range of benchmarks.

The Raspberry Pi 2 was a revelation, but the Pi 3 is more of an incremental improvement. However, the speed boost certainly makes a difference, and the built-in Wi-Fi will make the Raspberry Pi more useful for various projects.

Because we weren't able to run our standard suite of benchmark tests on the Pi 3, we had to settle for simpler cross-platform tests that we could use to get a general idea of performance.

Low price; Includes 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1; Improved performance over previous generation

Requires lots of additional hardware to function as a full PC; Limited operating system selection; Software setup may prove challenging

Manufacturers of full-scale PCs have trouble coming up with exciting new features across each generation of their releases; there are only so many ways you can spin minor improvements. The same would also seem to be true of the Raspberry Pi, if not truer: It's never looked like much more than a light-featured PCB with a couple of familiar ports tacked on. But for the newest iteration of the product, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, the usual modest bump in performance is accompanied by a particularly impressive new feature: Wi-Fi. Now that you no longer need to be tethered to an Ethernet cable, there are even fewer limits on where your imagination can take you. And as the Pi 3 retains the $35 purchase price that's defined the line since day one, it's now an even better option for the makers, enthusiasts, or educational types who could benefit from this sort of system, and, as such, earns our Editors' Choice. Design and FeaturesLike its predecessors, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B ($44.73 ...

The introduction of wireless connectivity and a boost in performance over its previous iteration make the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B appropriate for a wider variety of projects—and it still costs just $35.

Low price; Includes 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1; Improved performance over previous generation

Requires lots of additional hardware to function as a full PC; Limited operating system selection; Software setup may prove challenging

This is still the only circuit board PC to own.

Has it really been four years since the Raspberry Pi blasted onto the single-board computer scene? Well, it has and to celebrate the Raspberry Pi Foundation has released its latest version, Raspberry Pi 3, which is more of an evolution than a revolution.

There are several key things that have helped make the Raspberry Pi such a success. They include its feature set (like the GPIO pins), its ease of access, and its price. And it seems that this last point is a core value for the Raspberry Pi foundation.

The Raspberry Pi 3 is the latest version of the circuit-board computer that caused such a fuss in 2012. This is the most powerful version of the Pi, making the ￡4.25 Pi Zero look like, well, it's worth about four quid.

Great value; Significant performance increase; Great free online learning resources; Built-in wireless connections

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