Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ WiFi Performance

Yesterday in our Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ benchmarks we looked at the faster Cortex-A53 CPU cores of this new $35 USD ARM SBC as well as its much faster Ethernet and better thermal management over earlier Raspberry Pi boards. The other area improved with the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ is the WiFi/WLAN wireless networking, which is what we have benchmarks of today.

Now that I've had more time with this new Raspberry Pi board that launched last week, I have some wireless networking results for those curious about its capabilities. With the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is now dual-band 802.11ac WiFi while retaining Bluetooth 4.2 support. I ran some benchmarks using the latest Raspbian release on the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ when using both 2.4GHz and 5.0GHz WiFi.

These results were compared to the older Raspberry Pi 3 Model B single-board computer running off the same Raspbian 9.4 release with the Linux 4.9 kernel. I also tossed in the ASUS TinkerBoard given its generally high performance and being one of the newer SBCs in my possession. The ASUS TinkerBoard was run with Debian 9.4 on the Linux 4.4 kernel.

The ARM SBCs were tested in the same location relative to the ASUS RT-AC3200 used for this round of 2.4/5.0GHz 802.11ac WiFi testing. Netperf and iPerf were run via the Phoronix Test Suite.