Overclocking computer systems is a fun way to extract some free performance, or at least see how far you can push the hardware before you run into practical limitations. The newly released Raspberry Pi 5 with BCM2712 SoC is no exception here, with Tom’s Hardware having a go at seeing how far both the CPU and GPU in the SoC can be pushed. The BCM2712’s quad Cortex-A76 CPU is normally clocked at 2.4 GHz and the VideoCore VII GPU at 800 MHz. By modifying some settings in the /boot/config.txt configuration file these values can be adjusted.

In order to verify that an overclock was stable, the Stressberry application was used, which fully loads the CPU cores. Here something like a combination of stress-ng and glxgears could also be used, to stress both the CPU and GPU. With the official actively cooled heatsink the CPU reached a temperature of 74°C with a whole board power usage of about 10 Watts. At idle this dropped to 3 Watts at 46°C. At these speeds, the multiple Raspberry Pi 5 units OCed by Tom’s Hardware were mostly stable, though one of the team’s boards experienced a few crashes. This suggests that this level of OCing could still be subject to luck of the draw, and long-term stability would have to be investigated as well.

As for the practical use cases of OCing your Raspberry Pi 5, benchmarks showed a marked uplift in compression and Sysbench benchmark scores, but OCing the GPU had no real positive impact on YouTube or 3D performance, leading even to a massive increase in dropped frames with video playback. This probably means that increasing the CPU clock may be beneficial, but OCing the GPU could be futile without also OCing the RAM frequency, if at all possible.

Realistically, the Raspberry Pi SoCs never were speed monsters, with even the Raspberry Pi 4B’s SoC being beaten handily in 2020 by a budget dual-core Intel CPU.  The current Intel Alder-Lake-N-based N100 SoC has a 6 Watt TDP and boosts up to 3.4 GHz while its Xe-LP-based iGPU (with AV1 decoding support) makes for a decent gaming experience within a ~16 Watt power envelope. Clearly, any OCing of the Raspberry Pi boards is more for the challenge of it, but then so is running the latest Intel CPU at 10 GHz with liquid nitrogen cooling.