Raspberry Pi 5 overclocked to 3.6 GHz by ScatterBencher — but exotic cooling didn’t help push clocks any faster than air
Originally published on tomshardware.com by Mark Tyson on 12 February 2024
Expert overclocker Pieter-Jan Plaisier, known as ScatterBencher, recently tackled the challenge of pushing the Raspberry Pi 5 beyond 4 GHz, aiming to redefine its limits. Equipped with advanced tools, software tweaks, and even liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooling, he managed to achieve a maximum stable clock speed of 3.6 GHz—matching results attainable with simpler air cooling. Despite his ambitious setup at Elmor Labs, the Raspberry Pi 5’s Broadcom BCM2712 SoC proved resistant to higher speeds, locking up or crashing at any attempt beyond this barrier.
ScatterBencher’s efforts began with promising results. Leveraging Raspberry Pi OS updates and the NUMA emulation patch from Jeff Geerling, he successfully pushed past a prior air-cooled plateau of 3.0 GHz, achieving nearly 30% faster performance than stock (2.4 GHz). Confident in the potential for greater speeds, he turned to LN2 cooling, using a specialized pot for the SoC. However, despite cooling the chip to -90°C and incrementally increasing clock speeds, stability remained elusive beyond 3.6 GHz. Lower temperatures led to diminishing returns, while pushing voltages up to 1.55V using the Elmor Ample-X1 power card also failed to yield any further gains.
The challenge left ScatterBencher puzzled. With no scaling benefits from extreme cooling or increased voltages—tools typically essential in overclocking—he speculated whether the bottleneck lay in the SoC’s Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) or other components unintentionally constrained during the overclock. Although the dream of a 4 GHz Pi remains unfulfilled, his experiment highlights both the resilience and limits of the Raspberry Pi 5’s architecture, offering insights for future endeavors in SBC overclocking.
Disclaimer: The content in this post includes excerpts from other blogs and websites. Full credit for the original work goes to the respective authors and publications. This content is shared here for informational purposes only, to give our customers direct insight on where to purchase the mentioned items, and all rights remain with the original creators.
