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 Features
Like its predecessors, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B ($45.01 at Amazon) measures only about 3.5 by 2.5 inches—small enough to fit in your shirt pocket—and you should be able to reuse any cases or other devices designed for the earlier models. Also essentially identical are the ports, which offer basic functionality and not a great deal more. You'll need to connect at least a keyboard and a mouse to two of the four USB 2.0 ports , a display to the full-size HDMI port, and a micro USB charger (such as for your cell phone) to actually power the thing. This time around, though, the Raspberry Pi folks recommend a 2.5-amp adapter "if you want to connect power-hungry USB devices." In any case, there's no Power switch; plug in the charger, and the Pi 3 turns on, or unplug it to turn the system off.

Another must on your end: a microSD card, which has been imaged with the operating system you plan to use, as there's no other on-board storage. (Doing this is not especially difficult, and the instructions on the Raspberry Pi Foundation website are clear and easy to follow, but the process may prove tricky if you're not familiar with it.) Aside from that card slot, which is located on the underside of one of the board's edges, there's also the requisite combo headphone-composite video jack, plus an Ethernet port. Anything else you may want to add is optional, and, of course, is where the "creativity" aspect of the Raspberry Pi comes into play. Headers for hooking up the proprietary camera or touch display are present, too, as are 40 GPIO pins for connecting to whatever else you may be able to dream of. All of this is, likewise, held over from other years' Raspberry Pi models.

What's not, however, is wireless connectivity. Because the Pi 3 comes equipped with 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE (aka Bluetooth 4.1), you now have a lot more methods of connecting with the Internet, other computers, or your Bluetooth devices. Considering that the goal of the Pi has always been freedom, these additions give you more of it than ever.

Also ramped up is performance. You still get 1GB of RAM with the Pi 3, but the 64-bit Broadcom BCM2837 ARM v8 processor is a quad-core chip that runs at 1.2GHz (compared with 900MHz for the 32-bit processor on the still-available Raspberry Pi 2 Model B ($39.98 at Amazon) ), for an added speed boost when you're doing pretty much anything.

One important thing to remember is that using the Pi 3 with its ARM chip limits your choice of operating systems. Chances are, you'll just want to go with the recommended Linux distribution, Raspbian (based on Debian Jessie), which is optimized for use with the Pi and available for download from the Raspberry Pi Foundation's website either by itself or as part of the NOOBS multi-OS installer. It's pretty traditional in design and content, and includes a lot of the basic software you'll want, such as the LibreOffice suite, the Epiphany Web browser, and various other free and open-source versions of standard programs. (For the record, Microsoft has released Windows 10 IoT, a version of its flagship OS, to work with systems like the Pi 3. But this is intended primarily for use by device manufacturers and serious maker types; it doesn't have a standard Windows interface, and thus won't be something most people will want to use, but it's a nice option for those who want a broader range of compatibility and capability than Linux may provide.)

Performance and Conclusions
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. The Pi 3 completed the SunSpider 1.0.2 JavaScript benchmark test in an average time of 2,860 milliseconds (ms)—noticeably speedier than the Raspberry Pi 2, which took about 4,630ms on the same test (and using the same OS on the same microSD card). On Browsermark 2.1.3, the Pi 3 earned a score of 315, compared with the Raspberry Pi 2's 201. We saw similar results in the Google Octane 2.0 and the JetStream 1.1 benchmark tests—the Pi 3 would consistently finish well ahead of the previous-generation model.

As always, it's worth pointing out that the Pi 3's performance doesn't compare in any serious way with what you'll see from even a diminutive desktop with a beefier processor. We fired up the 2016 version of the Intel Compute Stick($599.00 at Amazon) and ran our same tests (using Chrome rather than Epiphany), and the competition wasn't even close. The Compute Stick nabbed a SunSpider time of 938.15ms and a Browsermark score of 1,717. No, you're not likely to perform many intense computational chores on the Compute Stick either, but its Intel Atom processor will take you further than the Pi 3's ARM chip will.

The question is: Where do you want to go? And with the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, you can answer that however you like. You can set it up as a computer for the kids, a super-easy email and Web-browsing machine, or as the basis for some exciting project of your own. You shouldn't get it if power is any sort of an objective concern; on that score, either the InFocus Kangaroo Mobile Desktop ( at Amazon) , our Editors' Choice for pocketable PCs, or the Shuttle XPC Nano ($349.99 at Amazon) , our top pick for budget desktops, manage much better, and are still pretty inexpensive ($99 and $279, respectively). And for that matter, this top-of-the-line Raspberry Pi isn't even the cheapest PC out there anymore—that honor belongs to its pint-size brother, the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero. But the Pi 3's potent combination of speed, features, price, and near-infinite potential for personal, enthusiast, and educational projects is enough to make it a real winner—and an Editors' Choice—in our book.