The Raspberry Pi 5 offers impressive performance that you can push even further through overclocking. By boosting your CPU and GPU speeds beyond their stock settings, you can achieve significant performance gains for resource-intensive tasks like gaming, media streaming, and using your Pi as a desktop computer.
Content
- Is It Safe to Overclock Your Raspberry Pi 5?
- What You’ll Need to Overclock Your Pi
- (Optional) Benchmark Your Raspberry Pi
- Overclocking the Raspberry 5 CPU
- Overclocking the Raspberry Pi GPU
Is It Safe to Overclock Your Raspberry Pi 5?
Due to slight manufacturing variations, many CPU and GPU chips can actually perform above their conservative stock speeds, which prioritize stability above everything else.
With moderate overclocking, the biggest risk is system instability, which can usually be avoided through stress testing and fine-tuning your overclock settings.
Physical damage to the Raspberry Pi becomes a serious concern mainly if you really push the overclock to the limit without sufficient cooling, but even a mild overclock will theoretically very slightly decrease the chip’s lifespan compared to running it at stock speeds. But does it really matter if your Pi can last only, let’s say, 8 years instead of 10? Probably not.
As far as warranty goes, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is very supportive of overclocking. In the past, extreme overclocks could trigger an internal “warranty bit,” but the consequences of it were largely nonexistent except perhaps for a few third-party retailers using it as grounds to refuse service.
The good news is that the Pi 4 and 5 have removed the warranty bit entirely, so it’s now impossible to tell if a board was ever overclocked.
What You’ll Need to Overclock Your Pi
To overclock your Raspberry Pi, you’ll obviously need a Raspberry Pi 5, but you can also follow along if you have a Raspberry Pi 4.
You’ll also need an SD card with Raspberry Pi OS installed. If you don’t have one already, you can follow our tutorial on how to set up Raspberry Pi OS on your Raspberry Pi and then come back to this guide.
To interact with your Pi, you have a couple of options. If you’re comfortable with the command line, you can overclock your Pi remotely from a different computer via SSH. Alternatively, you can hook up your Pi to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and overclock it directly from the Raspberry Pi OS desktop environment.
When it comes to power supplies, I strongly recommend using the official Raspberry Pi 5 27W USB-C Power Supply. The Pi 5 has higher power requirements than its predecessors, and these demands only increase when overclocking. Using the official power supply will give you the best chance of overclocking success.
Finally, it’s important to keep in mind that overclocked Pis generate more heat, so make sure to provide adequate cooling. Your two main options are passive heatsinks and active fans (many cases, including the official one, include a fan).
(Optional) Benchmark Your Raspberry Pi
Before overclocking your Raspberry Pi, it’s a good idea to benchmark its current performance. This will give you a baseline to compare against after overclocking so that you can quantify the performance gains.
There are plenty of Raspberry Pi benchmarking tools on the market, but I’ll be using Sysbench for CPU benchmarking and glmark2 for GPU benchmarking.
To install Sysbench, open the Terminal and enter:
sudo apt-get install sysbench
Once Sysbench is installed, you can get a baseline of your Raspberry Pi’s performance by running in the Terminal:
sysbench cpu --cpu-max-prime=2000 --threads=4 run > pre-benchmark.txt
This command will run a CPU benchmark using four threads and save the results to a file named “pre-benchmark.txt.” You can review this file later to compare the stock performance to your overclocked results.
To install glmark2, open the Terminal and enter:
sudo apt install glmark2-x11
Once installed, you can run a benchmark by simply typing:
glmark2
The benchmark will run through various scenes testing different aspects of GPU performance, including shading, texture handling, and buffer operations. Each scene is scored individually, and at the end, you’ll receive an overall score.
Overclocking the Raspberry 5 CPU
The Raspberry Pi 5 ships with its CPU running at 2.4 GHz, but many users have successfully pushed it to 3.0 GHz or even slightly higher (only some chips are capable of reaching such high numbers).
To begin overclocking your Pi 5, you’ll need to modify the config.txt file, whose location was changed last year (it used to be located in “/boot/config.txt”). Open the Terminal and enter:
sudo nano /boot/firmware/config.txt
The config.txt file controls various hardware settings, and we’ll be adding new parameters to increase the CPU speed. Scroll to the bottom of the file and add the following lines:
arm_freq=2600 over_voltage_delta=50000
The arm_freq parameter sets your desired CPU frequency in MHz, while over_voltage_delta adds extra voltage to help maintain stability at higher speeds. The value 50000 adds 0.05 volts to the CPU’s base voltage, which provides enough headroom for most moderate overclocks while remaining within safe limits.
After saving your changes (Ctrl + X, followed by Y and Enter), reboot your Pi:
sudo reboot
To verify your overclock took effect, open a terminal and run:
watch -n 1 vcgencmd measure_clock arm
This command continuously monitors your CPU frequency. You’ll notice the speed fluctuating as the Pi’s dynamic frequency scaling adjusts to workload demands -this is normal.
I also recommend you open another Terminal window and monitor your system temperature:
watch -n 1 vcgencmd measure_temp
If you notice that your temperatures consistently hover above 80°C, you should improve your cooling or reduce your overclock settings because that’s when the Pi begins to throttle the CPU.
To test if your Pi is stable with the new CPU frequency and voltage settings, you can run the Sysbench benchmark again and save the output to a different file:
sysbench cpu --cpu-max-prime=2000 --threads=4 run > post-benchmark.txt
In my case, the number of events per second measured by Sysbench went up from 98637.25 to 104240.92 after increasing the CPU frequency by just 200 MHz!
Once you’ve established a stable overclock, you can gradually increase the frequency in 100 MHz increments until you find your Pi’s stability limit and then dial it back slightly just to be safe.
Should you encounter crashes or boot failures, you can always hold down the spacebar during boot to temporarily disable the overclock settings.
Overclocking the Raspberry Pi GPU
While CPU overclocking can provide solid performance gains, GPU overclocking on the Raspberry Pi 5 tends to be less impactful and more likely to introduce system instability.
The stock GPU frequency of 800 MHz is already well-optimized for most use cases, and pushing it further often yields diminishing returns. In fact, some users have reported that aggressive GPU overclocks can actually decrease performance in certain scenarios, likely due to memory bandwidth limitations and software optimization issues.
However, if you’re interested in experimenting with GPU overclocking, you need to open the Terminal and edit the config file:
sudo nano /boot/firmware/config.txt
At the bottom of the file, you can add a line to set your desired GPU frequency. I recommend starting with a modest increase to 850 MHz:
gpu_freq=850
The maximum stable frequency varies between different Pi 5 boards due to silicon lottery variations, but most can handle up to 900 MHz with proper cooling.
If you’ve already overclocked your CPU as instructed above, then you don’t need to do anything else and can save the modified “config.txt” file and restart your Pi so that the changes take effect. If not, add this line to add 0.05 volts:
over_voltage_delta=50000
After saving your changes and rebooting, you can monitor your GPU frequency in real-time using:
watch -n 1 vcgencmd measure_clock core
To verify stability, I recommend running glmark2 again. If you notice graphics glitches, system freezes, or decreased benchmark scores, you should reduce your GPU frequency or return it to stock settings.
Now that your Raspberry Pi CPU and GPU are both overclocked, you should see noticeable performance gains, so the next logical step is to put them to good use.
Cover image by DALL-E. All screenshots by David Morelo.
David Morelo –
Staff Writer
David Morelo is a professional content writer in the technology niche, covering everything from consumer products to emerging technologies and their cross-industry application. His interest in technology started at an early age and has only grown stronger over the years.
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