Overclocking

In my post about the new home of GCW, I had a picture of the Raspberry Pi based version of the server. What probably stood out the most in that picture was the cool (sic!) ICE Tower active cooling system. That Pi has been rock solid since I turned it on, so given the insane cooler, I thought I’d try playing around with a bit o’ the old overclocking.

The stock CPU and graphics clock speeds on a RPi 4 are 1.5 GHz and 400 MHz respectively. In order to get the CPU clock past 1.75 GHz, you need to install firmware that is in advance of what comes with the standard Raspbian distro, so I figured I’d start with 1.75 GHz. For the graphics clock, I tried 600 MHz, which I’ve seen in a couple of how-to videos.

With those speeds, the Pi booted just fine, but after some heavy use (i.e. 3 simultaneous video playbacks) the graphics became unstable. I backed the graphics clock off to 550 MHz and the performance stablized.

With the ICE Tower running, the core temp never went above 40 degrees Celcius even under the heaviest load — compare that to the Pi thermal throttling at 80 degrees showing a single video with no cooling.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with the result. The combined boosts in clock speeds have made an immediately noticeable improvement in performance. It’s entirely possible that this has reduced the lifespan of the board, but honestly at the price I paid for it, I can live with that.