While the Raspberry Pi 5 is two to three times faster than a Pi 4, it can be overclocked for even better performance. Discover how to overclock your Raspberry Pi 5’s system-on-chip to unleash that free speed boost.
Why Overclock Your Raspberry Pi 5?
The Raspberry Pi 5’s default CPU speed of 2.4GHz is significantly faster than the Pi 4’s 1.8GHz, offering noticeably zippier performance for many tasks. Its VideoCore VII GPU (graphics processing unit) also runs at 800MHz by default, compared to the Pi 4’s VideoCore VI at 500MHz.
Just as withoverclocking a Raspberry Pi 4, however, these speeds can be boosted by overclocking the Pi 5 SoC’s four CPU cores and GPU. This should lead to improved performance for processor-heavy tasks such asusing Raspberry Pi as a Plex media server, or attempting torun a large language modelfor an AI chatbot.
The downside to overclocking is that it may reduce the lifespan of your Pi 5. Using excessive overvoltage may even void the warranty. So you do it at your own risk—especially if pushing it to higher speeds.
Keep Your Raspberry Pi 5 Cool
To enable overclocking of your Raspberry Pi 5’s SoC (system-on-chip), you will need to keep its temperature below 80°C (176°F). Once it reaches that level, the SoC will automatically trigger a safety mechanism that starts throttling back the CPU cores, reducing their speed until the temperature drops. If the temperature manages to reach 85°C (185°F), maximum throttling will be triggered, including for the GPU.
While the Raspberry Pi 5 actually runs cooler than a Pi 4 when running typical desktop tasks, under heavy loads it does need some help with its thermal control. This is why the Raspberry Pi company launched the Pi 5 with a couple of optional extras.
The official Raspberry Pi 5 case has a built-in cooling fan that you connect to a JST port, labeled ‘FAN’, on the Pi 5 board. For even more cooling power, the Active Cooler accessory–mounted on top of the Pi 5 board—has both a heatsink and fan. We used the Active Cooler in our overclocking tests.
How to Overclock a Raspberry Pi 5
As with otherRaspberry Pi modelsrunning the official operating system, Raspberry Pi OS, you can alter the clock speed of the Pi 5’s SoC by modifying theconfig.txtbootup settings file.
Before you start, it’s best to update and upgrade your system. Open a terminal window by clicking its icon in the top menu bar, or viaMenu > Accessories > Terminal, and enter:
This may take a little while to check for the latest software packages and then update the system.
Install Monitoring Tools
Before overclocking the Raspberry Pi 5, we’ll install a couple of useful tools so we can compare before-and-after performance and temperature. Firstly, install the Neofetch system info tool:
To see the current system info, run:
It should show the Pi 5’s default CPU speed of 2.4GHz. Next, install the “stress” workload-generating tool:
To install the Stressberry stress-testing tool in Raspberry Pi OS “Bookworm”, you’ll first need to create a virtual Python environment (we called ours “overclock”), change directory into it, and activate it:
You can then install Stressberry:
Now let’s do an initial stress test at the default clock speed for comparison with the overclocked results later. Run this command for a 100-second test using all four CPU cores:
After awaiting a stable baseline temperature, which may take a little while, the stress test will run and each line will show the current CPU temperature and frequency (in MHz), which should get up to 2400.
Edit the Config.txt File to Overclock
It’s now time to change the CPU speed settings to start overclocking the Pi 5. Open theconfig.txtsettings file in the nano text editor:
Add the following lines:
Here, we’re setting the CPU clock speed to 2.8GHz, also bumping up the GPU speed, and increasing the SoC core voltage to help—you may or may not need to apply this overvoltage to make it work. Exit nano and save the settings by pressingCtrl+X, thenYandEnter. To activate the overclock, reboot the Pi 5:
When it reboots, run theneofetchterminal command again; you should see the new CPU speed of 2.8GHz.
Stress-Test Your Overclocked Pi 5
You’ll need to run Stressberry from within your Python virtual environment, so reactivate that:
Then run the same Stressberry test as before (with a different filename for the output):
This time you should see that the CPU reaches the overclocked speed of 2.8GHz, or whatever speed you”ve set. It will also have a higher temperature—in our tests, with an Active Cooler fitted to the Pi 5, it reached a maximum 64.8°C (148.6°F), well below the level at which throttling would be applied.
Some users have managed to boost the CPU speed further, to 3GHz or slightly more, and the GPU to 1GHz, but mileage may vary for different Pi 5 boards and the cooling method used. If overclocking at a certain level causes system instability, you should try a more modest overclock. In some cases, the Pi 5 may not even boot up to the desktop, usually due to a lack of sufficient power.
What if the Pi 5 Won’t Boot?
If, after changing the overclocking settings inconfig.txt, you find that your Raspberry Pi 5 won’t boot up, don’t fret. The easiest workaround is to simply hold theShiftkey during bootup to temporarily disable the overclock; the Pi 5 should then boot normally.
If that doesn’t work, you can always turn off the Pi 5, then remove the microSD card and connect it (using a USB card reader) to another computer to edit theconfig.txtfile from there. You can then alter the overclocking settings, or comment them out by adding a # symbol at the start of each line.
It’s even possible to underclock the Pi 5 if you want to reduce power drain (perhaps for a portable project) and/or keep the temperature down.
Raspberry Pi 5 Overclocking Is Easy to Do
As you’ve seen, overclocking the Pi 5 is a relatively straightforward process. With the extra processing power gained from overclocking, you can run CPU-intensive tasks more efficiently, so it may prove useful for tasks such as machine learning and large language models. Your newfound extra power will unlock even more project possibilities for your Raspberry Pi 5.
