News We Overclocked Raspberry Pi 5 to 3 GHz, Up to 25% Perf Boost

[Admin]

Pushing our Raspberry Pi 5 to the max we overclocked everything that we could see in order to get the best performance for no extra cash.

We Overclocked Raspberry Pi 5 to 3 GHz, Up to 25% Perf Boost : Read more

 

[bit_user]

Not a word about what cooling solution was used, temperatures, or how it affected power consumption?

This being Tom's Hardware, I had to check several times! I hope the article gets updated with some of this info.
: )

 

[Ravestein NL]

My thoughts exactly and did the CPU/GPU throttle in some tests?

 

[LabRat 891]

Now that the CPU is OC'd,
take the M.2 Hat and adapt a x4 Uplink PCIe switch/HBA, and start adding GPGPUs.

 

[bit_user]

Now that the CPU is OC'd,
take the M.2 Hat and adapt a x4 Uplink PCIe switch/HBA, and start adding GPGPUs.

Toms' Raspberry Pi 5 Live Blog article linked to one where Jeff Geerling tried a variety of things, ultimately working up to dGPUs:

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Testing PCIe on the Raspberry Pi 5 | Jeff Geerling

www.jeffgeerling.com

​

 

[apiltch]

Not a word about what cooling solution was used, temperatures, or how it affected power consumption?

This being Tom's Hardware, I had to check several times! I hope the article gets updated with some of this info.
: )

Thanks (and I mean this) for holding our feet to the fire. I'll put some more detail in. I guess we though it was implied but we should have said that we used the official Raspberry Pi 5 cooler. In our review, we noted that this is really the only cooler that fits right now (you can awkwardly try to put a Raspberry Pi 4 cooler on it but it doesn't fit correctly).

Les mentioned some of this in the review that we should have put into the breakout overclocking article as well. He said "At 3 GHz the Raspberry Pi 5 had an idle temperature of 46.6°C and consumed 3 Watts. Under stress the Raspberry Pi 5 hit a top temperature of 69.2°C and consumed 10 Watts."

 

[Giroro]

I want to see the Pi 5 performance compared to Pi 4, when neither has a heat sink or fan.

Not just thermals, but some performance numbers.

 

[bit_user]

I guess we though it was implied but we should have said that we used the official Raspberry Pi 5 cooler.

Indeed, that's what I thought most likely, but I hate making assumptions. Furthermore, your Raspberry Pi 5 Live Blog article did feature that 52Pi Ice Tower cooler:

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idle temperature of 46.6°C and consumed 3 Watts. Under stress the Raspberry Pi 5 hit a top temperature of 69.2°C and consumed 10 Watts."

Fair point. I did read that very shortly after it was posted, having stumbled across the launch coverage just as I was about to go to bed.
😫

Respect to you and your staff for covering that midnight launch! Actually, when did the embargo lift? Was it like 8 AM UK?

 

[mechkbfan]

How does these benchmarks compare to x86 CPU/GPU?

Are we up to Intel sandy bridge laptop performance now?

 

[brandonjclark]

This is not an import comment or anything, but I REALLY liked the clip art used for this article.

 

[bit_user]

This is not an import comment or anything, but I REALLY liked the clip art used for this article.

Good point. I think I sort of noticed it, but was too eager to get into the content.

(Image credit: Future / Pexels / Openclipart)
​

Ah, that's a WebP. Which reminds me about a recent critical vulnerability. Make sure your browsers are up to date, people!

"Critical libwebp Vulnerability Under Active Exploitation - Gets Maximum CVSS Score"
https://thehackernews.com/2023/09/new-libwebp-vulnerability-under-active.html​

I know cybersecurity isn't really Toms' brief, but I am a bit surprised not to see that mentioned here!

 

[bit_user]

How does these benchmarks compare to x86 CPU/GPU?

Are we up to Intel sandy bridge laptop performance now?

Yes, I expect so. The A76 didn't quite reach Skylake performance. I didn't find a comparison between A76 and x86 cores, but I found this one between its server-oriented cousin (N1) and Skylake Xeon SP.

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Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16315/the-ampere-altra-review/5​

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That Altra is going to have larger caches and maybe some larger buffers, but the cores have the same pipelines and width as the A76. The "33" in the model number conveniently tells you it's running at 3.3 GHz. The Xeon 8280 is basically Skylake with a turbo frequency of 4.0 GHz. So, that puts Pi 5 decidedly below a Skylake desktop i5, especially at the Pi's stock frequency of 2.4 GHz and given that it's using A76 and not N1 cores.

However, it gets more interesting if you're looking at laptop CPUs. I made a little spreadsheet to get a sense of how their respective IPCs compare. Once you nullify Skylake's clockspeed advantage, it looks like the N1 has it beat on integer performance and offers comparable floating point performance.

Make​	Model​	int (Rate-1)​	float (Rate-1)​	Turbo Clock​	int per GHz​	float per GHz​
Intel	Xeon 8280	5.39​	7.54​	4.0​	1.35​	1.89​
Ampere	Altra Q80-33	5.20​	6.12​	3.3​	1.58​	1.85​

 

[Surce]

Has anyone had trouble overclocking the Pi5? Theoretically, you can set it to 3GHz with good heat dissipation, but as soon as I enter any related data in the /boot/config.txt, it stops booting, even with underclock values. Even removing the microSD and editing the file on another PC to delete the overclock lines, I can't rescue it, and I have to reinstall / reflash the system and so on. I've selected correctly the Pi 5 on the Raspberry Pi OS Imager, and selected also Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64 bits).

It's odd because when I set those values and reboot, the Pi5 tries to boot and eventually hangs a few secs later, doing nothing other than keep the fan working (I don't have access to a screen, it's a headless system). Even removing the microSD card and putting it in my PC to delete those added lines from the /boot/config.txt file, I can't recover it, and I have to flash it again, super weird.

This is the data I'm adding:
[all] # Doesn't work
over_voltage_delta=50000
arm_freq=3000
gpu_freq=1000

[all] # Doesn't work too
over_voltage=3
arm_freq=3000
gpu_freq=1000

There's one thing I've noticed that wasn't the case before. On the Pi4b, the /boot/config.txt file (where you overclock the machine) was there as expected, working flawlessly, but on the Pi5 it seems to be a symbolic link to /boot/firmware/config.txt, could that be the reason why it's not working?

I've also tried to edit directly /boot/firmware/config.txt with the same results so I'm kinda lost atm so any help is more than welcome ):

 

[bit_user]

Even removing the microSD and editing the file on another PC to delete the overclock lines, I can't rescue it,

I had a problem on an older Pi, wherein I mounted the SD card in another PC and after that the Pi wouldn't mount the filesystem because its timestamp was in the future, relative to the Pi's last-remembered timestamp. Do you have a RTC battery installed? If not, there's a workaround for this problem, but you'd best look it up because I forget the details.

As for the rest of your overclokcing troubles, I'd suggest the official Pi forums would be a much better source of assistance. Feel free to come back and let us know what you learned.

Raspberry Pi Forums - Index page

forums.raspberrypi.com

Good luck!