Raspberry Pi 5 Overclocked To A Record 3.4 GHz, Scores Fastest Performance Yet

Overclocker Jeff Geerling succeeded in breaking the current world record for overclocking the Raspberry Pi 5.

Breaking world records by no means is an easy task, particularly when the platform is as small as a Raspberry Pi. However, Jeff Geerling broke all the world records in his latest Raspberry Pi's overclocking experiment. Jeff was able to hit 3.4GHz on its CPU, achieving the highest single and multi-core scores in Geekbench 6. The highest scores were previously held by Thomas Kaiser with 1037 single and 2137 multi-core scores.

Jeff was able to break the record by reaching 3.3GHz, which yielded 1092 single and 2163 multi-core scores. However, these clock speeds weren't achieved easily. Even though Jeff was able to hit 3.14GHz on Pi day a few months ago, there were voltage limitations, which didn't let the Pi 5 easily reach above 3.0GHz. After the release of new firmware and the NUMA emulation patch, this no longer seemed to be a problem for breaking the limits.

With a custom code and some voltage tweaks, Jeff was able to maintain 3.3GHz at around 1.07 volts but reaching a stable 3.4GHz was much harder. After failing several times, Jeff implemented various cooling methods, including Peltier cooling and a custom Noctua fan directly throwing air on the Pi.

The Raspberry Pi 5 would keep freezing before the cooling methods were implemented and even though the voltage was already at around 1.08V, the hardware wasn't able to complete the Geekbench 6 tests successfully. After adding some cooling methods, Jeff was able to hit a 1094 single-core score with 3.3GHz.

Reaching over 1100 points and 3.4GHz was a much bigger challenge since his system was getting memory errors constantly. But installing another heatsink under the Pi board and increasing the voltage to 1.08V worked flawlessly. Not only did the Pi 5 achieve 3.4GHz but also resulted in 1121 single-core and 2219 multi-core points, breaking his previous records.

Even though Jeff had this incredible achievement, he doesn't recommend trying this at home. This was just a 'fun' experiment for him, which yielded tiny improvements. Considering the Raspberry Pi 5 consumed as much as 20W at 3.4GHz, it's not something that would be useful for regular users.

Still, he was lucky to have this golden silicon from his wafer die, which is one of the reasons why he was able to hit such high clocks and Geekbench scores.

News Source: Jeff Geerling