How to overclock your Raspberry Pi 3

in #raspberry7 years ago (edited)

Hello again in this How to i will show you a step by step in how to Overclock your Raspberry pi3.
You can use this also in other SBC that runs Unix.

To Overckock your pi you need to modifi this /boot/config.txt file

I use nano as a text editor, you can use whatever you want. In some distributions nano doesn't come native so you need to install it.
To install the nano text editor you need to open a command line and type this command

sudo apt-get install nano

Now that you have the nano text editor installed you need to edit the /boot/config.txt in a super admin mode (known as root) to access that file as a root you don't need to log in as a root you can make it using the command sudo
So let's begin

sudo nano /boot/config.txt

And here you need to add this command in this exact order

arm_freq=1300
gpu_freq=500
core_freq=500
sdram_freq=500
sdram_schmoo=0x02000020
over_voltage=2
sdram_over_voltage=2

Now press ctrl+x and save the file then reboot, to reboot you need to use this command

sudo reboot

With this setup you will overclock you pi to 1.3Ghz (from factory its 1.2Ghz) i found this way its the most stable.

Note by overclocking your Pi you might lose your warranty so if you do this you are doing on your own risk

I saw some guys on the internet that are overclocking their Pi to 1.4 and even 1.5 but for this you need to have an extra cooling its not enough only a big heat sink you need also an cooler. By overclocking your SBC it will heat up even more so you need to keep an eye on it

Here is the command to check your CPU Temp

cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp
Divide the result by 1000 to find the value in Celsius

To check your Cpu Frequency you need to type this command

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq

Divide the result by 1000 to find the value in MHz.
If you will type this command and it will show you 600000 do not panic the Raspberry it working on 0.6Ghz on idle ;) so you need to stress it out to see the maximum speed of the processor or to type this command

sudo cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_max_freq

And this for the minumim speed (idle)

sudo cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_min_freq

Hope you found this useful and also you can check my other's How To's

More about OverClocking you can find here https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/config-txt/overclocking.md

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Feel free to use and improve this little tutorial