Raspberry Pi 4 Overclocking

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers this time we're going to be overclocking a raspberry pi 4 in order to get a little bit more performance out of our favorite single board computer now before we begin i just need to caution that overclocking can damage your pie it could destroy a raspberry pi so please only try what i'm going to show you in this video at your own risk but with that warning out of the way let's go and get started right here we have the raspberry pi 4 we're going to overclock which is an 8 gigabyte model running raspberry pi os from an ssd and it's fitted with an ice tower heatsink and fan as we need decent cooling for overclocking i put all of this together in my recent ultimate raspberry pi 4 rig video and it's good to be now stressing it out so let's transition to the raspberry pi os desktop here we are and before we get down to the overclock i thought there was a few things we should set up firstly i thought it might be useful to add a few more applets to the panel so i'm going to go up here and press the add remove panel items there and if we do an add over here there are various things that could be very useful if we're doing overclocking specifically i'm going to add cpu frequency front end i'll add that in like that and they'll also go back in and add in down there cpu temperature monitor and also will add in you can probably now guess cpu usage monitor like that and these have all now appeared along here and i'm just going to move them along just alone to there and up it'll go along the top like that there it is over there and we'll also take the temperature monitor and move that along as well and also the cpu usage monitor there we are that's how i like to have things on my panel i normally have those there and many people ask me in my videos how do you get them up there on the raspberry pi so basically this shows us the cpu's utilization it's not doing very much at the moment tiny little graph down there this is showing us its temperature and if we hover over this one we can see the frequency of the raspberry pi forza processor which as you can see there is altering a bit and it's worth pointing out but the raspberry pi 4 like all modern computers runs at lots of different speeds and its default speed its idle speed as we can see here is 600 megahertz and the pi will increase its frequency as it needs to as it needs to do more demanding things oh look there we just nipped up to a 1.5 gigahertz which is the standard maximum speed for a raspberry pi 4 but we're of course going to be increasing that and we need to keep an eye on the temperature when we're overclocking because if a raspberry pi gets to more than about 80 degrees it will throttle it'll reduce its speed and therefore we won't get the benefits of the overclock and so overclocking is always about trying to get the maximum possible frequency for your cpu whilst keeping the temperature for the pi at least under 80 degrees c and you might therefore be thinking what you told us earlier chris about the fact you could damage your pi by overclocking that's got to be wrong because if a pi gets a too hot it'll simply throttle itself back reduce its speed it won't get damaged and that's that's great in theory and normally is true however you might remember back in my first ever raspberry pi 4 cooling video we had a raspberry pi 4 running at a good 90 degree centigrade for a long period of time it can happen the mechanisms for throttling don't necessarily always save a processor so if you are going to be overclocking a raspberry pi or anything else be aware there is always a slight risk of damage to the silicon so do everything at your own risk anyway having uh talked about these little things up here let's look at a couple of other things firstly we want to be able to test out our overclock and so what i've got here is a cayden live with a very small edit in an edit showing some boats and some beach and sea and things like that's a nice peaceful thing to look at doesn't it and i've set this up with the in the renderer a script so we can render this out and see how long it takes to render so i'm going to start that script and it'll take a while so we'll fast forward until the render has completed and there we are we can see that on a raspberry pi to standard speed it's rendered out in what three minutes and a 45 seconds so we've got a benchmark we can compare to what happens with overclock the pi in the next segment of the video finally by means of setting things up i've written this little bash script and i've written this in guinea which you can find over in the programming under there we are the guinea programmers editor and i've created this script so we can check the frequency the raspberry pi cpu is running at and measure its temperature and stress it out give it a bit of a test so what does this do well it sets things up to be a bash script it clears the screen to be tidy it then down here shows the cpu frequency which just is reported by that command there and the temperature of it which is reported by this command here and then it runs sysbench to force the cpu to go up to its full turbo speed initially 1.5 gigahertz so what this is doing is a factoring prime numbers up to a value of a thousand that won't take very long but it'll force the pi to go up to it to maximum turbo speed and on the end of this there's a bit of code it just suppresses the output to stop us having too much stuff coming up on the screen and it is worth pointing out before you can run this script you must have installed sysbench on your raspberry pi by going to a terminal and typing a sudo apt-install sysbench anyway assuming you've done that down here after we've runs this bench we're going to report the frequency of the pi again and then we're going to do a longer suspense test where i'm going to leave all the output coming up on the screen we might want to look at it it's going to factor prime numbers here up to 50 000 that'll take a couple of minutes so this will give a chance to see if the pi is stable at the overclock we've used if you can get through that test it's probably stable and then finally we report some numbers again either save this script in a folder called a scripts if we do a list there you'll see there's a folder there called scripts cd scripts will take us to it and this then there is the script and to make the script executable i've already entered the command sudo chmod plus x and the name of the file which here is overclock test sh if you don't do that you won't have an executable file to run anyway having said all of that with a lot of setup in this video we're going to uh find the command to actually run it there we are and we'll just run it through like this it'll clear the screen report the price initially starting at 600 megahertz it's then run the suspense test and got it to 1.5 gigahertz and it's now running the longer part of the test to give us a bit of a stress out to the pipe and you can see up here we're now stressing out the pipes at 100 processor utilization up there in the cpu usage monitor temperature's going up a little bit still not too bad with the ice tower and we can see over here as well the frequency is at a 1500 megahertz we're all set up to do some exciting overclocking so let's just let this test to complete to give us another reference point and there we are it's finished and the pies we can see was fully stressed out up here it's not got too hot so that's the benefits of using a ice tower and it took 237.4 seconds to run this test before we've overclocked the pie greetings here i am back again in raspberry pi os and it's now time to implement our overclock yes good things come to those who wait patience is a virtue and all that kind of stuff now to actually implement an overclock we need to edit the raspberry pi's config.txt file which it executes when it boots up and there's various ways you could edit this file i'm going to use guinea the editor we were looking at in the last section where i wrote my bash script there it is but if i run guinea from the menu it won't run in route mode it won't be able to alter the config.txt file so what i'm going to do is to go to a terminal and type a sudo guinea like that to run guinea in route mode so we can actually alter the config.txt file and if we just go to file and open you'll see it actually found already because i've been here already earlier today but if you didn't find it there you just go to file system and go to boot and you'll find it down there config.txt and you can open it up and if we go down here you'll see there's a little overclocking section already there somewhere there we are on comment to overclock the arm the the processor and there's lots of different commands we could put in here if you want to know what they all are go to this fantastic page on the raspberry pi foundation website called overclocking options in config.txt and you'll see lots lots of information is it there if you want to get deeply into overclocking on a raspberry pi anyway here what we're going to do is fairly straightforward we're going to increase the maximum turbo speed of a raspberry pi 4 initially to 1.7 gigahertz so i'm going to take this line here arm frequency equals 800 and put it to a 1700 and we'll have to uncomment this line so it's actually executed but uh to make that work we'll also have to give the pi a little bit more umph a little bit more voltage to the cpu to do that we've put a command in here which is going to be over voltage and it's going to equal two and what over voltage does is for every step of one you give it it increases the voltage of the processor by 0.025 volts so over voltage equals two as we've got to here is actually increasing with cpu voltage by 0.05 volts and if you're wondering overvoltage works in the range minus 16 to 8 it works from under voltage to overvoltage but i would strongly recommend keeping your values in the range one to six anyway this should work for now so we'll just do file and a save like that tender close down a guinea and then we'll do a sudo reboot and see what happens when we reboot our pi and here we are coming up again i will speed through of course till we fully rebooted and there we are we have a successful reboot we haven't uh messed things up so far which is always a good to see and we now need to use the script we did earlier to check out what is going on so let's just do a cd scripts to get where we were and just remind ourselves what it was there we are it must be sitting in the buffer somewhere there we are and if we now execute our overclock test there we are you'll see yes the price started off at 680 megahertz but has gone up to a 1.7 gigahertz which is what we wanted and it's now running through the longest suspense test hopefully in a stable fashion seems to be stable so far so we'll let this test complete and see what kind of result we get and there we are it is completed these things seem to be stable still the pi is running at a it's a high oh it's dropped down to 680 megahertz already look it doesn't hang around at the higher speeds does it process utilization there was clearly very high temperatures absolutely fine and executed the testing what 209.35 seconds so a significant improvement in performance from the 237.4 seconds it took on a 1.5 gigahertz raspberry pi 4. so let's also do the cayden live test this will be very interesting i think a real world test of an overclocked pi and we'll just bring in our test file like that and go to a render and our script is sitting there already so let's uh run the script and uh here we are heading towards completion a few seconds left i just wanted to point out whilst the pie is going at it's a maximum speed here 1700 megahertz our fantastic overclock we're not getting full processor utilization doing a render out in the cayden live not that we get the full process utilization running the sysbench test this is after all a real world test but uh let's see if they're gonna finish there we are yes the pie is a drop down its speed again and it's rendered out in what three minutes under 24 seconds so we have had some improvement here it was 3 45 before but it's not quite as big an improvement as you might expect with the level of overclock but still we will solder on and overclock things some more right here i am back again to push the overclock even further we're back in aguini as you can see and here i put over voltage to six which is the maximum value i would recommend going to and i put the frequency to two thousand megahertz to two gigahertz that's psychological barrier and i'd point out you can also overclock the gpu and the pi the default frequency is 500 megahertz i've got a line here which will put it to 750 megahertz but in fact i'm not going to use that because in my experience you don't get a massive amount of benefit from overclocking the gpu and then d the raspberry pi foundation says the benefit is minimal it can give you potentially i think issues with stability trying to do a gpu as well so i don't know some people will disagree with that in the comments but i'm gonna stick just to overclocking the cpu here and we'll see if we can get the pi to run it to gigahertz so uh let's again do a save on that and we'll do a to-do reboot like that could i have taken that somewhere else i could have done i just like typing things it keeps me happy do you think we're going to see an exciting raspberry pi screen in a second a lovely little spectrum yes there it is and from there i will fast forward on to we've finished rebooting and here we are back again the pie is still working it's worth pointing out of course it might not work if you're trying different overclocking settings you might get to a point where you just get a black screen nothing happens the pi won't boot if that is the case you can try holding down the shift key during your next boot which will disable your overclocking and you can change the values back in config.text or if that doesn't work you might have to take your raspberry pi boot drive and plug it into another computer and edit the config.txt file there or in fact it might with the whole thing's corrupted and you've got to start again or maybe your entire pie is blown up not very likely slightly possible in which case you need to go and seize in a caller and contemplate the meaning of life anyway hopefully when you overclock you'll get things running again if we've got here so let's once again execute our script it's like that and why don't i use 3d scripts from the thing i don't know anyway let's run it there and yes we've got our two gigahertz there and it's showing up here as a gigahertz that's fantastic so let's see if this test will stably complete and there we are we do seem to be stable and working okay we're down to a 177.97 a significant improvement from what we saw previously so let's straighten and also repeat our caden live test and here we are waiting to go let's start the script there we are it's going high is again up to uh it's a 2 gigahertz speed let's say how long this one takes to complete and there we are we've broken the 3 minute barrier now 2 minutes 57 seconds to render this out and our 2 gigahertz overclocked raspberry pi 4. and in fact let's throw all the results so far onto a table so we can see exactly what is going on we've got some significant performance improvement here now in theory of course these results will be proving in a directly proportional way i've not worked it out maybe someone will work it out and let us know in the comments and we'll all thank you greatly for your your kind calculations anyway it's impressive as this is i wouldn't mind seeing if we can't just push things a little bit further so here i am back again overclocking on the silicon frontier and there's a gale raging outside which makes it feel even more exciting anyway as you can see i've now set the frequencies at 2.1 gigahertz and in fact this value gives us some very interesting results at least it did last time i tried it so let's save this and see what happens do our sudo and reboot bring the pi back up again and here we are back on the raspberry pi os desktop so we'll repeat our trick over previously just change to write a directory and run the script and as you can see the interesting thing is here i set 2.1 gigahertz we're actually running according to this measure anyway at 2.29 gigahertz and in fact if we go up here that also tells us we're running at 2.294 gigahertz 2294 megahertz which is a rather fast isn't it i'm not quite sure i believe this but it does seem to be stable and i found if i push the value beyond 2 100 things change energy again i don't get this speed i find setting to 100 gives me the maximum speed i can obtain on this particular raspberry pi with the ice tower keeping it nice and cool it's a extraordinary speed over 2294 megahertz so let's let the test complete see what results it gives us and there we are the test completed in 184.7 seconds and that clearly is a little bit strange because if we put it onto our table you see we got to 177.9 seconds on the previous setting of 2 gigahertz it suggests something's going a little bit right here but let's just finally run the caden live test this at least we're giving you something to talk about in the comments here we are so let's start the script and there we are it has finished in two minutes 49 seconds which again if we put it onto the table that clearly suggests we are running faster than we were with the previous settings two minutes 49 seconds rather than 257 but i think personally my takeaway here is that two gigahertz is a sensible limit for overclocking this raspberry pi four so there we are we've managed to make a raspberry pi 4 run a little bit faster as i said at the start of this video please be aware that overclocking can damage a raspberry pi it can destroy a raspberry pi so please only try anything i've shown you here at your own risk but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you said please press the like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very soon [Music]

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 123,703

Keywords: Raspberry Pi overclocking, Pi 4 overclocking, Raspberry Pi 4 overclock, overclocking raspberry Pi, ICE Tower, Raspberry Pi ICE tower, Raspberry Pi overclocking test, Raspberry Pi overclocking demo, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt

Id: Ty23K4g1Tyg

Length: 19min 51sec (1191 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 06 2020