10 reviews for CanaKit Raspberry Pi 4 4GB Starter Kit – 4GB RAM

Alfredo R.
Rated 5 out of 5
December 30, 2019
I was looking for a secure bulletproof, reliable, inexpensive way to setup my own home VPN server. The OS of choice had to be Linux and I didnt want to have a bulky, noisy, collecting dust computer running all day. Here comes the mighty Raspberry PI, this starter Kit except for the mouse and keyboard has everything you need to setup your Raspberry PI. although it works extremely well I dont use the desktop feature of the Raspberry PI, I disable it and doing so it saved me about 500 megs of ram. The only cable going to my Raspberry PI is the power cable. To connect to my PI I "ssh" into it, if you're a serious Linux enthusiast, you provably wont need to have a monitor attached to it. The fan that comes with the PI hardly makes any sound you cant even hear it's running. Also it's possible using python to control when the CPU fan turns on, you can enable it to run only when the CPU heat it's above, lets say > 80 °F. I didnt install the default NOOBS OS instead I downloaded DietPi v6.25.3 I like DietPi because it has many packages you can download and it's very customizable to use. See screenshots attached, good job CanaKit Raspberry Pi folks.
Michael F. Griswold
Rated 5 out of 5
December 1, 2019
An update and upgrade from Bridger General (1 Star) to General of the Army (5 Star): Shortly after posting my review I was contacted by CanaKit. I went over the product review with them in addition to the only two options I can think of that I didn’t do were changing out the micro HDMI to standard HDMI cable that came with it, and a different make/model TV/monitor. At that point I thought maybe there wasn’t enough power coming out of the micro HDMI connector to the stand HDMI connector from the Pi 4 B to display an image blaming fault on the power supply as state in my review. After going through all the troubleshooting steps described in my Amazon review, and in addition to the ones just explained I felt that there wasn’t anything a technical support technician could do that I didn’t already do but willing to make another “go of it” because there has been a lot of exciting projects on YouTube about the Raspberry Pi 4 4GB. They sent me a new Raspberry Pi 4 4GB Starter Kit - 4GB RAM for me to try out. I received the kit Monday morning on the 4th. Again I followed the instructions to the letter supplied in the kit, putting the Pi together and setting it up correctly and taking my time. The basic same problem as before! No activity and nothing was displayed on the screen (monitor/TV)! I didn’t brother going through the standard troubleshooting steps again because I felt it had to be something entirely different. I decided to try using an old VIZO monitor/TV I had laying around the house instead of my newer Seiki 24-inch TV/monitor I had been using before contacting CanaKit. This time it worked flawlessly! As it turned I did a careful examination on both connectors on each monitor and notice that when I connected the HDMI cable to the newer Seiki 24-inch TV/monitor it wouldn’t fully seat like all the other HDMI cables would, including the one that came with my old Pi 3 B+. I would suggest to anyone having similar issues to first check your connectors on the TV/monitor you will be using before returning the device for a refund. Thanks CanaKit, very thoughtful and kind of you to go out of your way to do this, and much appreciated in helping me getting this amazing device up and running! I will be looking forward to the next upgrade soon!Very Disappointed, My Heart is Broken! Was looking forward to using this amazing device as a second desktop PC. Problem: the red power light illuminated on the board, but there is was no other activity and nothing was displayed on my screen (monitor/TV). I checked to ensure that the Micro-SD card was fully seated all the way in the Micro-SD card slot of the Raspberry Pi 4 B board itself, ensured that the Micro-SD card is properly formatted with compatible software, Raspbian Buster the official operating system (OS) for all models of the Raspberry Pi by downloading it and installing it on a Micro-SD card or use the NOOBS Micro-SD card that came with the kit which is the easy installer for the Raspbian OS. I tried booting first from the Micro-SD card with NOOBS installed on it and then using a 32GB Micro-SD card with the the new Raspbian Buster OS for the Raspberry Pi 4 B the new standard version of Raspbian OS, and for all earlier Raspberry Pi models too. Both with no success but both of these Micro-SD cards will work on my old Raspberry Pi 3 B+ that I purchased from Amazon April 1, 2018 and is working great so far! Finally, I checked to see if the device’s EEPROM had become corrupted (rare but possible) by following the recovery instructions on the Raspberry Pi 4 B’s website by removing the Micro-SD card, disconnecting the device from power, then reconnect it. If the green LED does not flash then the EEPROM will need to be reprogramed but the green LED was flashing. Returned the item for full refund. Maybe i'll purchased another one again but not sure when. Might wait until they come out with a Raspberry Pi 4+ next year. I suspect it might be the power supply that comes with the kit and is not enough to power the device. What else could it be?
Hoops
Rated 5 out of 5
October 27, 2019
This is an absolutely amazing system. I was able to get this running in a matter of minutes. The performance is really good. I set up SMB and Node on this and it works really well as a server.This can almost be a replacement for an entire desktop. It’s sufficient enough for browsing the web and checking email.
William
Rated 5 out of 5
October 27, 2019
In my honest opinion, getting a kit or package isn't a bad way to go.1. You get pretty much everything you need to get started (excluding monitor, keyboard, mouse)2. Buying all the stuff separately you will come close to how much the kit cost anyways. Unless you can find some cheap better quality buys. This kit is worth it.As for RPI4, I suggest invest in active cooling. You could get a pi fan that i found out, will snap right into the case. They do currently run hotter than rpi3. The little fan cooled my pi down at least 10 degrees C°. Definitely do consider active cooling.
DCFusor
Rated 5 out of 5
January 7, 2019
I got one of these direct from Canakit a couple days ago, and have tried it with a fresh Raspian Buster as well as an upgrade from Stretch via the "change the sources for apt and do update and dist-upgrade" route. There were a couple of bumps in the latter due to some changes, but I managed to overcome them and will be keeping that extensively modified to my taste version.This thing really is a possible laptop replacement. I got the 4 gig version, and it's hard to get it to use much more than 1 gb, actually - it took a few open tabs (including gmail) in chrome, audacity, some file managers, a couple terminals, and finally the arduino ide pushed it just a little past 1 gb reported. This was running NGINX, MariaDB, some of my daemons, VNCserver and a few odds and ends in the background as well.While it's not *quite* as fast as my old Lenovo core 2 duo (which has an SSD) - it's close, and maybe faster for code that manages to use all 4 cores.The bad:The heatsinks are in "joke" territory. Even at idle you're almost throttling. A fan as shown on the "explaining computers" youtube channel was addded, and it stays as cool as can be now, extremely nice, the noctua 40mm fan is worth the bucks for this. Use a 1.5" hole saw, very carefully, in the top...SystemD changes (not rpi's fault) broke a few things....again. It actually erased a couple of my .service files and I had to put new copies in a new place and then enable them through systemctl, vs it just figuring out they were in the right directory.A lot of things are nicer in Buster...network setup in particular, the cpu temperature monitor is nice...it's just generally slicker than Stretch was.I'll be getting more of these...
Value Appreciator
Rated 5 out of 5
November 19, 2018
Quite an entertaining and highly useful product. Spent about 4 hours getting it to work. Ended up having to burn new SD cards to restore the units booting system, then load up the operating system. When I initially started to put the components together, I made an error in hooking up the cooling fan, which the Raspberry definitely did not like. Good news was that after everything was corrected and software loaded, the tiny little box delivered a great performance. Good kit with a solid value for anyone wanting a really small computer that can do A LOT.
William C. Vaughan
Rated 5 out of 5
October 17, 2018
This is a nice initial starter kit for this little computer. It has the Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM, heat sinks for CPU and memory modules, a fan powered through the GPIO, a case, and a 32 GB micro-SD card with NOOBS installed. A power supply with on/off switch is also included. Instructions are straight forward and easy to follow. Pictured is the RPI 4 case with board, fan, heatsinks installed. It boots from the supplied micro-SD card with Raspbian installed on an attached external SSD connected via USB-3 port. Also pictured is an external Olympus 2 DAC attached to the second USB-3 port for routing sound to an external speaker. The screen is a 10" HDMI monitor connected to the mini-HDMI port on the RPI. A mouse and keyboard connect to the two USB-2 ports. SSD, monitor/mouse/keyboard, and DAC were purchased separately from Amazon. I highly recommend a USB-3 connected NVME SSD for use as the primary file system. The micro-SD is only needed at this time for booting the system. The SSD provides much higher speed, reliability, and storage capacity for I/O.
Anthony Winfree
Rated 5 out of 5
February 25, 2018
I purchased this Raspberry Pi 4 to replace a Libre Computer Le Potato (NIC failure?) being used as a Kodi appliance. It is, and I expect it will continue to, perform admirably in this capacity.The kit had everything needed to get the RPi 4 going (including a microSD card pre-flashed with NOOBS) and I only had to refer to the instructions once (this is my 4th RPi installation) to see which heat sink went where. The fan installed easily, though there could have been better instructions on which GPIO pins to attach the leads to (the internet provides the answer!).A note about the RPi 4; like all the other RPi's, these are development and educational products. It's a happy coincidence that they can be used for so much more. That said, there are occasional hiccups in the software. One of those with the RPi 4 (as of this writing) is the 'No sound on HDMI'. It's easily fixed IF you're comfortable with the lInux command line. It only took me about 30 minutes of internet searching to find the solution and another 3 minutes to make the configuration changes.Other than that, this kit is an excellent value!
Nicolas Green
Rated 5 out of 5
January 11, 2018
The kit arrived nearly a week ahead of the estimated arrival date. Keep in mind it ships from Canada but it was a quick trip through customs into the US.The kit contains everything pictured and as mentioned in another review the “heat sinks” don’t seem to do much to help with the actual heat it puts off. The preloaded SD card was great! With this kit I had the pi up and running within 30 minutes ready to start working on projects.Very happy with the kit and looking forward to purchasing more in the future!
Michael Bienek
Rated 5 out of 5
January 2, 2018
CanaKit: As always, a well thought out package.Performance: I write software for a living. In some of my more sophisticated programs there are performance metrics so I can measure if new algorithms speed up or slow down a program. Using those I can say this thing is faster than my HP Elitebook laptop (AMD PRO A12-9800B 8 compute cores 2.7GHz) for a single threaded process. Obviously the laptop can do more things in parallel and it is also hampered by 100 different Windows threads and I.T. bull***t and it is running Cygwin on top of Windows ... so not a totally fair comparison, but still, the Pi4 is compiling the program faster, loading faster (SD card vs a hard disk) and executing faster. Just saying, I am impressed.Thermal: Although the Pi should run fine without additional heatsinks and fan, heat is what ages electronics. I would definitely recommend a kit with a fan. The fan with this kit is so quiet it is hard to tell if it is running. That is good for a home theater since video is not super intensive and you don't want any background noise.Use: Put this $100 computer on the back of your TV add a ~$20 wireless keyboard, connect to your home's WiFi and you've got a home computer that is very snappy for 99.9% of (non-gaming) users.Raspian Linux: All the normal tools and libraries I need installed without a problem