Raspberry Pi 3 Model B in detail

Command Line and Desktop

When you establish an SSH connection, you'll quickly discover that the RPi3 is significantly faster than its predecessor. The listing of directory contents, keyboard configuration via raspi-config, and update of the system via package administration all work much faster on the RPi3. Large programs, such as Minecraft, LibreOffice, and Sonic Pi, run more smoothly on the graphical desktop. LibreOffice still stutters a bit when scrolling, but this issue is a small and manageable inconvenience.

You can optimize application load times even more by overclocking the SD card. One way of overclocking is to enter

dt_param=sd_overclock=80

as a new line in the config.txt file to increase the clock rate from 50 to 80MHz. I tested this configuration using the same SD card used to create Table 1 and achieved 8.89MBps when writing and 28.8MBps when reading. The significantly higher read performance was accompanied therefore by a slightly reduced write speed, perhaps because of more frequent write errors. The user should experiment a bit when working to achieve maximum performance.

Changing to the RPi3

An SD card already used in an RPi2 can be prepared for use in an RPi3. To make the change, you should update the system on the older Rasp Pi via:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

You might discover you need to make some manual modifications and add additional packages for supporting WiFi and Bluetooth. For example, I found in testing that I needed to reset the calibration for a display HAT, which had, up to then, been configured correctly. The Raspberry Pi Foundation discourages using rpi-update. You should only use this command when you have special reasons for updating the kernel and the firmware on a bleeding edge version.

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