You have a Raspberry Pi board, and you’re wondering (or you forgot) how much RAM is in that board?
In this quick tutorial I will show you various easy ways to find out.
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Table of Contents
Which Raspberry Pi board? (2, 3, 4)
If you still have an older version – Raspberry Pi 2, 3 – then you can be sure that you have 1GB RAM, as it was the only available option. In this case, problem solved, you can basically ignore the rest of the tutorial.
You are learning how to use Raspberry Pi to build your own projects?
Check out Raspberry Pi For Beginners and learn step by step.
But if you have a Raspberry Pi 4 (or 4B), then there are actually 4 different versions when it comes to the RAM configuration:
- 1 GB (not available anymore, but if you bought an early one maybe you have this configuration)
- 2 GB
- 4 GB
- 8 GB
Find how much RAM directly by looking at the board (hardware)
Here is where you can find the RAM on a Raspberry Pi 4.
As you can see form this picture, on my Raspberry Pi board I have put some heat sink, and thus I can’t see what’s written on the RAM component.
But if you can see it, then depending on what’s written, you can know what RAM config you have:
- 1 GB: 4HBMGCJ
- 2 GB: D9WHZ
- 4 GB: D9WHV
- 8 GB: D9ZCL
If you can’t find a code like that, or if you have something that covers the RAM, no worries, you can find the amount of RAM from software.
Find how much RAM from the desktop
Boot your Raspberry Pi board and get access to the desktop – either using an external monitor, or VNC for remote control.
Click on the Raspberry Pi menu > Accessories > Task Manager.
Here you will see the RAM usage as well as the total available RAM.
In this example, I’m using 200MB of RAM for a total of 1849MB. There is always a bit less RAM than what’s advertised, so 1849MB is actually the 2000MB version, or 2GB.
Find how much RAM from the Raspberry Pi terminal
If you don’t have access to the desktop (or maybe you just want to SSH into your Pi), open a terminal and run the “top” or “htop” command.
If you run “top”, you’ll see “MiB Mem :” with a value, that will be the total amount of RAM in MB. In my example, I also find 1849MB, which corresponds to the 2GB configuration.
With “htop” you get a better visualization.
You can see here the total RAM in the “Mem” field, and you can also deduct that this is the 2GB version.
To conclude here, as you can see, finding out how much RAM you have in your Raspberry Pi is something very quick and easy – so don’t worry too much if you forgot which configuration you bought.