We’re overclocking the Raspberry Pi 5 SBC up to 2900 MHz in 5 minutes or less using the 52pi ice tower cooler.

I’ll speedrun you through the settings and provide some notes and tips along the way. Please note that this is for entertainment purposes only and not the whole picture. Please don’t outright copy these settings and apply them to your system. If you want to learn how to overclock this system, please check out the longer SkatterBencher guide.

All right, let’s do this.

5 Minute Speedrun

When you’ve entered the operating system, open the linux terminal.

Type “sudo nano /boot/firmware/config.txt.” This opens the config.txt text file which the Raspberry Pi device uses for configuring the boot paramaters. The GPU reads config.txt before the Arm CPU and Linux initialize.

Type “include ocs_5minoc.txt.” This text file will be included when the config file is read to configure the boot parameters. We prefer to use a separate file for our overclock settings. If you want to disable the overclock, you can simply comment out the line with a hash-sign.

Press Control+O to write the file, then Control+X to exit the text editor.

Type “sudo nano /boot/firmware/ocs_5minoc.txt.” This opens the text editor for the file which will contain our overclocking parameters.

Type “arm_freq=2900.” That increases the upper limit of the Arm core dynamic voltage-frequency curve from the default 2400 MHz to 2900 MHz.

Type “gpu_freq=1100.” That increases the upper limit of the VideoCore frequency from the default 910 MHz to 1100 MHz. It also increases the frequencies of other IP blocks linked to the VideoCore such as the image signal processor, the HEVC hardware video block, and the AMBA data bus connecting the Arm CPU cores with the VideoCore GPU and memory subsystem.

Type “v3d_freq=1200.” That increases the upper limit of the VideoCore 3D engine IP block from the default 960 MHz to 1200 MHz. The 3D engine is the only VideoCore IP block that can run an independent frequency.

Type “over_voltage_delta=25000.” That offsets the entire dynamic voltage-frequency curve by +25 mV. While the minimum voltage of 720mV at 1.5 GHz is still enforced, the operating voltage for 2900 MHz is now 1.0V.

Press Control+O to write the file, then Control+X to exit the text editor.

After a reboot, the Raspberry Pi 5 is now running at its overclocked and overvolted parameters.

Raspberry Pi 5 Overclock Performance Improvement

We re-run some benchmarks to ensure everything works as intended and check the performance increase compared to the default settings. Higher is better, and all are higher. The Geomean performance improvement is +11.15%, and we get a maximum improvement of +21.62% in Sysbench.

The highest Core Clock measured in the operating system is 2900 MHz.

When running the S-TUI Stability Test, the average Arm clock is 2895 MHz with 1.00 volts. The average SoC temperature is 72.6 degrees Celsius. The average Arm core power consumption is 7.99 watts.

And that’s it. I thank you for watching and the Patreons for the support. See you next time!