Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W mini review – Benchmarks and thermal performance

The Raspberry Pi Foundation launched the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W board yesterday with the main difference against Raspberry Pi Zero W board being the much faster Raspberry Pi RP3A0 SiP with a Broadcom quad-core Cortex-A53 processor clocked at 1.0 GHz and overclockable to 1.2 GHz.

I received my sample shortly after publishing the announcement, and I had time to test it. Since the main difference is the processor, I’ll focus this review on benchmarks and whether additional cooling is required for the board.

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W kit unboxing

If you purchase the board for $15, that’s all you’ll get, but Raspberry Pi Trading sent me a kit with Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W SBC, a USB OTG adapter, a mini HDMI to HDMI adapter, the CSI camera cable, and four rubber pad for the enclosure that comes with three covers: full, hole for 40-pin GPIO header, or hole for the camera.

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Kit

The board is exactly the same size as the Raspberry Pi Zero W, and so are the ports’ arrangements. Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W boardI have a Raspberry Pi Zero somewhere, but I’m unable to find it…

First boot and system information

I downloaded the Raspberry Pi OS May 2021 image from the official website and flashed it to a MicroSD card with USB Imager. After inserting the microSD card, an HDMI cable, and Logitech USB dongle for a wireless keyboard and mouse combo, I connected the power supply. I specifically used MINIX NEO P2 100W USB adapter so no joking around!

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Review

It would boot to the desktop, but I was unable to use the keyboard or mouse for that matter. I switched to a USB keyboard still no luck. I replaced the USB OTG adapter with mine, but no luck. I tried the microSD card in a Raspberry Pi 4 just to make sure there were no issues with the image itself and tried again in Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. It worked somehow and I could carry on with the setup wizard.

Raspberry Pi OS setup Pi0 2 W

I also enabled SSH to have easier access to the command line, and made sure I had the latest version of the packages:


Some system info:


It’s detected as the same Broadcom BCM2835 as found in Raspberry Pi Zero, instead of BCM2710 / BCM2710A0, but it does not matter as four Cortex A53 cores are detected.


The CPU frequency will vary between 600 and 1000 MHz, the idle temperature is around 47°C, and out of 493 MB total memory, 181.4 MB is used with nothing running. Needless to say, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is not designed to be used as a desktop machine, but for some specific tasks or even headless projects, it should be great value.

I could confirm idle temperature and CPU frequency (600 MHz) with vcgencmd utility:

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Benchmarks with Phoronix

Let’s install Phoronix


I’m using the older Phoronix Suite 8.8.1 to match the version I used on Raspberry Pi 4 review.

Let’s start the benchmark for a comparison with others:


The full results can be found on OpenBenchmarking, but let’s check some of the specific results.

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Benchmark-Phoronix John The Ripper

John the Ripper is a multi-threaded benchmark, and here the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W performs surprisingly well compared to a Raspberry Pi 3. Software/firmware may have improved since then, as in theory, the latter should be 40% faster with a score of about 729. You’ll also notice Raspberry Pi 4 is only marginally better than Pi Zero 2 W, and there’s an easy explanation the Pi 4 was naked at the time, with the firmware lacking optimizations released later on. That just means the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W performs well without heatsink even in a room at about 28°C.

C-Ray Benchmark Raspberry Pi Orange Pi

C-Ray should the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W getting very close to Pi 3 performance.

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W FLAC Audio EncodingFLAC audio encoding is no different, except we’ll notice the superior performance on Raspberry Pi 4 which must have some specific instructions that accelerate encoding.

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W temperature chartFor reference, this is what the temperature chart looked like during testing, so never above 75°C.

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W benchmarks with SBC Bench

We can have a closer look at the performance and temperature under by various loads installing SBC Bench scripts:


Let’s run the benchmark:


No throttling was detected, and the temperature never went over 63°C. The room temperature was about 26 to 27°C at the time of the benchmark.

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W SBC-Bench temperature chart

This is how results compare to other Raspberry Pi boards at stock frequency.

7-zip benchmarks

AES benchmarks
AES-256 with 16KB blocks

Let’s try to overclock the board to 1.2 GHz by editing /boot/config.txt:


then reboot and check and check the frequency:


Let’s run SBC Bench again:


Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Overclock Temperature

SBC Bench detects “Silent throttling” but I’m not sure what that means with the temperature not exceeding 70C, and no apparent drops in frequencies in the log:


An overclocked Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W now performs just as well as Raspberry Pi 3 B+ in the 7-zip test, at least with the numbers we’ve got.

7-zip Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Overclocked
7-zip results

It’s too easy, so let’s put the board inside its enclosure to warm things up a bit…

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W case

SBC bench:


I got a few problems with RPI Monitor going down during the review, so no chart this time, but we can check the temperature in the log:


Still always under 70°C. I find the average load a bit low at 2.88, so I repeated the test to double-check, and there are indeed there are four p7zip processes running at the same time. It’s just the benchmark may not run long enough to get close to a load average of 4.

7zip load average

Although it will not be needed in most cases, I still decided to test the board with a heatsink to see how much the temperature would lower.

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W heatsinksBut the heatsinks I used with Raspberry Pi 4 were not quite suitable for the smaller board, especially the “ICE Tower CPU cooling fan“… So I went with a smaller heatsink that could also be used within the enclosure.Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W HeatsinkLet’s run SBC Bench script one last time for today:


Same silent throttling warning, but 7-zip results were marginally better (up to 3,648 points), and the temperature only went up to about 64°C.

Pi Zero 2 W Heatsink overclocked temperatureThat’s about 6°C cooler than our overclocked test without a heatsink.

Conclusion

The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W performs nearly as well as a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ especially when overclocked, and despite its small size has no problem staying cool. That means most people will not need to add a heatsink to the board, unless possibly for full loads for an extended time, or higher room temperature (35°C+). However, the smaller memory capacity (512MB) and available connectors will probably make it suitable for different use cases.

I’d like to thank Raspberry Pi Trading and Eben Upton for sending a review sample. I may continue this review a little later by checking out the power consumption in different configurations using Qoitech Otii Arc power supply.

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19 Comments
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tkaiser
tkaiser
3 years ago

Thank you! So single-threaded performance at 600 MHz is identical or even slightly better than original Zero (ARM11 at 1000 MHz). Multi-threaded performance at least 4 times better.

Also interesting the DVFS opp at the different clockspeeds (slight reduction to what they used with RPi 3B/3B+):

tkaiser
tkaiser
3 years ago

Just realised you did upgrade both OS while testing: you started with Thread X from Apr 30 2021 and kernel 5.10.17 and were later on ThreadX from Sep 30 2021 and kernel 5.10.63.

Probably important settings changed when upgrading ThreadX: dvfs=2 -> dvfs=3, desired_osc_freq=0x325aa0 -> desired_osc_freq=0x331df0

over_voltage_avs has been adjusted automagically by ThreadX based on arm_freq. I guess there’s some room for improvements / experiments to bring temperatures / consumption further down. At least it’s not an ARM11 fed with 1.35V any more…

tkaiser
tkaiser
3 years ago

It shouldn’t matter but most probably with most recent settings the CPU cores at 1000 MHz run at a slightly lower voltage than 1.2125V and as such consume a little less.

Would also be interesting whether disabling CPU cores really results in lower max consumption. 2016 when I did some tests with RPi 3B this was not the case (ThreadX being the boss and doing whatever the RTOS wants 😉 )

bezeria
3 years ago

Thank you for this review. Can we have a benchmark comparison of rpi zero2 against the radxa zero?

tkaiser
tkaiser
3 years ago

> Radxa Zero. It should be at least twice as fast

IMO more like 70% to 80% faster (both single-thread and multi-threaded). And the Radxa board should consume a little less power regardless of idle or full load.

tkaiser
tkaiser
3 years ago

In fact someone just now sent a PR with Radxa Zero results: https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/pull/23

While memory (and AES of course) performs much better, integer performance isn’t that great (just a bit above Zero 2 level) but the testing was affected my massive swapping.

Also I wonder why cpufreq is limited to 1.8 GHz…

Salvador
Salvador
3 years ago

Tony told me than the amlogic blob clearly reduce performance when loading all cores on the radxa zero. That’s common on amlogic socs I guess.

tkaiser
tkaiser
3 years ago

Not sure why he thinks so since the 1.8GHz limitation is a DT setting (that’s why sbc-bench is walking through all cpufreq OPP).

When you look in results list at Radxa Zero and then above you can compare 3 boring SoCs all at 1.8GHz: S905Y2, RK3566 and H6. They all perform more or less the same (though the A55s in RK3566 accessing RAM much faster). BTW: If you would ‘overclock’ the ‘Renegade’ entry below to 1.8 GHz then RK3328 would also look the same.

tkaiser
tkaiser
3 years ago

The 7-zip results should be taken with a huge grain of salt since due to low memory 7-zip’s internal benchmark did something different on Zero 2 compared to devices with 1GB RAM or more: only 2 dictionaries were tested on the Zero 2 compared to 4 on devices with more RAM.

It’s a bit unlikely that Zero 2 at 1200 MHz outperforms the 3B+ at 1400 MHz… but Zero 2 shows slightly faster memory access (both bandwidth and latency).

Theguyuk
Theguyuk
3 years ago

On YouTube a tester used a much bigger cooler and did some retro gaming on this device, for those interested in such gaming. The heatsink used covered some of the gpio holes.

and.elf
and.elf
3 years ago

I wish I’d waited for this instead of buying an rpi3 a few months ago, since I only use it for libreelec I’d saved a few bucks 🙁

Anonymous
Anonymous
3 years ago

I just enhanced my LibreELEC Pi4 by connecting to a Wi-Fi extender with the ethernet port.

Sometimes it’s nice to have real ports.

Eric
Eric
3 years ago

The orange pi one held awesome value for a very long run, too bad it didn’t have the same love and support.

David Willmore
David Willmore
3 years ago

There is Armbian and the linux-sunxi folks doing a lot of work to support the allwinner Opi boards.

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