Ambitious overclocker cools Raspberry Pi 5 with liquid nitrogen The dark arts of overclocking remain alive and well. And one master of the practice has turned their attention to the Raspberry Pi 5 with the intention of getting the diminutive computer all the way to 4 Ghz via various exotic and gloriously impractical means. We asked Pieter-Jan Plaisier of SkatterBencher.com why such a thing …
faster clocks don't always help. had an irma board in a 12 mhz 286 that supplied i think 6 3270 sessions to people on the network. kept crashing. turns out it would work fine at 6 mhz or 8 mhz but it had a software timing loop that wouldn't work at 12 mhz. had to slow the machine down for it to work reliably.
I was just a kid and thought the turbo button actually sped the PC up... only later on did I find out it locked the CPU speed because of software that was written to run at the speed of the CPU. My older brother showed me after I was trying to play a game and it was running almost twice as fast as I was used to...
I remember reading about some guy that once flew a kite in a lighting storm. What a waste of time. Obviously this isn't going to lead to any great discoveries but without human curiosity I would be writing this on a cave wall next to a crudely drawn cat meme.
Much more, even. The RPi5 has 4 cores at that clock speed and its cores each can execute multiple instructions per clock cycle whereas the 8086 takes I think a minimum of 3 cycles to execute even the fastest instruction. Data that would even fit in the amount of space an 8086 can address could fit entirely within an RPi's caches.
The 'A' indicates it was the socketed Celeron I was using, not the slotted version.
No tape or trace cutting required - you only had to do that if you wanted to install two of them in an Abit BP6 dual socket motherboard (also worries me I can remember that after 25 years, sure would be nice to control what things I remember what things are forgotten)
I had a P2, 200Mhz and a PII 350Mhz... the Slot A type one... Never really knew about overclocking... then I built my first proper PC with the PIII 600mkz, which could be clocked to 900Mhz with ease.
After that... for about 12yrs, I was overclocking everything... T-Birds, Bartons, Phenom II's.. 30% or more was easy on air cooling.
Now, if you can get 5% with less than 20% more power... it's considered good.
I say good on 'em for exploring this concept; people like this push boundaries for no practical value other than the challenge they present and, doubtless, they learn a lot along the way. Years ago when funding models were different, this would have been classed as 'research'.
It's like getting Doom running on a tractor's GUI or on a Lego brick's screen: it shows dedication, focus and requires an inherent understanding of the inner workings of systems. I'd argue it's the same class of endeavour that allows people to run Windows 11 to run on non-compliant hardware - which could be seen as a very good thing. It's a given that some folk really do want to run W11 but that's an issue we can leave to the medical profession to explain ;)
It stands to reason, actually. Most ARM processors are low-power devices designed to run as efficiently as possible. That means there isn't a lot of room in the specified hardware for movement from the default settings without overloading circuits that are designed to be at their peak at the specs for the chip. I'd expect the same of most RISC5 processors that are designed for low power environments, or even things like Intel's E-Cores.
I've stopped playing with overclocking when it started mandating liquid cooling. By that time, default specs were more than enough for my needs, and I didn't need to overclock my CPU to get things done on time.
The pentium 3, from 600mhz to 900mhz... some 25yrs ago now, I can't even remember exactly how I did it.
But a year or so later, AMD Thunderbird 1.2ghz to around 1.57Ghz on air cooling. I think that was on an Abit KT7A board... which was one of the best boards available at the time (if my memory remembers correctly)
Then, after that there was the AMD Barton core 2500, that a simple FSB bump from 166mhz to 200mhz along with some faster ram... gave you the same speed as the 3200 (which was just a number, not the speed, which I think was somewhere around 2.4ghz)... roughly 20yrs ago now.
After that... the AMD Phenom II 955BE, with the C2 stepping... 3.2Ghz stock, almost 4Ghz overclocked... on air. I think I settled in at 3.7Ghz to ensure complete stability... But even that was about 15yrs ago.
After that I was stuck on the AMD FX line and stopped trying to gain performance. Now on a 5800X3D, which can't be clocked at all.
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