The Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer will go on sale only in October, but the editorial team of the resource Tom’s Hardware I managed to get my hands on it and test its capabilities by overclocking the central processor and graphics subsystem. In one case, a productivity increase of 25% was achieved.
Image source: raspberrypi.com
In normal mode, the 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 processor installed on the Raspberry Pi 5 works at a clock frequency of 2.4 GHz, the VideoCore VII GPU runs at 800 MHz. Overclocking was done by software by editing the configuration file – there was no need to increase the voltage or perform other actions that could violate the warranty conditions. This increased the clock frequency of the central processor to 3.0 GHz and overclocked the graphics to 1.1 GHz.
In the initial phase it had to be ensured that the computer could basically work stably under such conditions. To do this, a five-minute stress test was carried out using the Stressberry utility: all four cores worked at 3 GHz, but there were no signs of unstable operation. The computer’s power consumption was 10 W and the chip temperature was between 69 and 74 °C. A proprietary cooler for the Raspberry Pi 5 was used during the stress test. However, the publication’s editor-in-chief, Avram Piltch, drew attention to freezes when trying to run benchmarks such as Geekbench 5.4.
Here and below, image source: tomshardware.com
Next, it was decided to test the graphics processor, for which we first turned to YouTube. The desktop in the operating system had a resolution of 2560 × 1440 pixels, but the video played in 1080p quality at 60 frames per second, measuring the relative number of frame drops at these settings. We tested in three configurations: standard with 2.4 GHz on the CPU and 800 MHz on the GPU and overclocked with 3.0/1.0 GHz and 3.0/1.1 GHz (CPU/GPU). Neither when watching videos on YouTube via Chromium and Firefox nor in the following test with the Sega Dreamcast game console emulator could a significant increase in graphics overclocking be achieved.
But the synthetic Sysbench test showed a noticeable increase in performance. The Raspberry Pi 4 scored 1,766 points in the single-core test and 7,068 points in the multi-core test; Raspberry Pi 5 with factory settings showed 2729 or 10,912 points; and overclocked to 3.0/1.1 GHz, 3423 and 13,681 points were already achieved. This is an increase of 25%, which is quite good considering that this result was achieved by changing the configuration file.
An increase was also achieved in a practical task – working with the 7-Zip archiver. In the compression task, Raspberry Pi 4 showed 4287 million instructions per second (MIPS), Raspberry Pi 5 with default settings – 9543 MIPS and overclocked – 10,356 MIPS (an increase of 8%). With decompression, the results were distributed to 7568, 13,321, and 16,238 MIPS, respectively (20% increase).
Add Comment