overclock

tl;dr Raspberry Pi engineers tweaked SDRAM timings and other memory settings on the Pi, resulting in a 10-20% speed boost at the default 2.4 GHz clock. I of course had to test overclocking, which got me a 32% speedup at 3.2 GHz! Changes may roll out in a firmware update for all Pi 5 and Pi 4 users soon.

My quest for the world record Geekbench 6 score on a Pi 5 continues, as a couple months ago Martin Rowan used cooling and NUMA emulation tricks to beat my then-record score.

Since boosting my Pi 5 from the default 2.4 GHz clock to 3.14 GHz on Pi Day, I've wanted to go faster. Especially since many other users have topped my Geekbench scores since then :)

In March, Raspberry Pi introduced new firmware that unlocked frequencies above 3,000 MHz for overclocking. This summer, NUMA Emulation patches boosted performance another 5-10% through memory access optimizations.

But even with a golden sample Pi 5, I haven't seen anybody go much beyond 3.1 or 3.2 GHz. The problem seemed to be power supply—the Pi's firmware limits the SoC to a maximum of 1.000V.

...and it's not just for Pi Day.

After posting my deep-dive into the Pi 5's new BCM2712 and RP1 silicon this morning, someone linked me to this GitHub issue: Raspberry Pi 5 cannot overclock beyond 3.0GHz due to firmware limit(?).

For the past few weeks, a few blog readers (most notably, tkaiser—thanks!) commented on PLLs, OPP tables, and DVFS and how something seemed a little off with the 3.0 GHz CPU limit—which was apparently recommended by Broadcom, according to that GitHub issue.

But today, @popcornmix generated a test firmware revision without the 3.0 GHz limit, and zealous overclockers can get to pushing the clocks higher.

Silicon lottery.

Now that the Raspberry Pi 5s been readily available (at least in most regions) for a few months, more people started messing with clocks, trying to get the most speed possible out of their Pi 5s.

Unlike the Pi 4, the Pi 5 is typically comfortable at 2.6 or even 2.8 GHz, and some Pi 5s can hit 3.0 GHz (but no higher—more on why tomorrow well... this limit may be able to be lifted).

After some testing, I found the default 2.4 GHz clock on the Pi 5 is pretty much the efficiency sweet spot, and after a lot more testing recently, I can confirm that's still the case, testing a number of Pi 5 samples.

tl;dr: 52Pi and Seeed Studio's water cooling solution for the Raspberry Pi 5 can be fun, and works better than any other solution—but at a steep price, and with a number of annoying quirks.

A few months ago, 52Pi reached out and asked if they could send a new water cooling kit they were working on for the Raspberry Pi 5. At the time, the hope was we could figure out a way to get very high overclock with adequate cooling.

Unfortunately—for reasons I'll explore more soon—the Pi 5 can't overclock beyond 3.0 GHz (it's not physically possible). Some of why is explained in my blog post Overclocking and Underclocking the Raspberry Pi 5.

But water cooling is still fun, and the product is in production now, so I figured I'd still give it a fair shot, and see if I thought it might be worth buying for certain niche use cases.

After the Raspberry Pi 400 was launched earlier this morning, there was a lot of discussion over the thermals and performance of the upgraded 1.8 GHz System on a Chip inside:

I wanted to spend a little time in this post testing overclocking, performance, power consumption, and thermals in depth.

Video version

There is also a video that goes along with this post, if you're more visually-inclined:

People have been overclocking Raspberry Pis since the beginning of time, and the Raspberry Pi 4 is no exception.

I wanted to see if the Compute Module 4 (see my full review here) could handle overclocking the same way, and how fast I could get mine to run without crashing.

There's a video version of this blog post, if you'd like to watch that instead:
Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 OVERCLOCKED.