Overclocking with retropie
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Hi there's a section in the retropie wiki to do with overclocking and does have some specific settings for a pi3. One thing I have found through my own overclocking is not to underestimate with the power supply . Most of the posts I've read about it say use a 2.5a supply , I found this is simply insufficient. I would get constant crashing and odd behaviour so went and found myself a nice beefy 5v 10a power supply. I can now run a stable 1400mhz overclock , usb hub , cooling fan and another externally powered usb socket inside my case as well as an led anti vandal switch without any problems.
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Thank you very much for the response and the info. I've checked out the wiki settings and I'm going to give them a go. My only concern is stress testing. Other forums are saying it's important to stress test when overclocking the pi3 as it can throttle back. Is there a dummy guide to doing this as I'm fairly new to the command line? Thanks again in advance.
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From what I've read the pi3 throttles when it gets too hot, above about 80c. A good set of heatsinks and a fan should do the trick, not had that problem myself as I had cooling set up from the get go. As for stress testing there are again plenty of guides about and also running quake 3 arena is said to be a good stress test for your overclock.
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Hi,
Rather than spam the forum with a cut and paste effort, here's a link to a similar thread on the forum with some links to my overclocking guides and the overheating issues (my post is second in the thread). I can't stress enough that soak-testing an overclocked system is absolutely critical.
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/2597/pi3-overclocking-overheating-issues
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Great information It was in fact your's among other guides that helped me to get my overclock settings sorted . Thanks for taking the time to share
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@cooky069 that's great to hear, thanks!
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Thank you for that information rr. It seems a very good in depth guide on what to do. On another note. I've seen some configs which include a sdram config with schmoo after it. Can somebody explain what this is and is it important?
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@vinylash I'm not sure I understand 'schmoo' (perhaps an autocorrect issue?)- can you post an example from the config?
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I'm no expert by any means but the schmoo setting according to one of the many guides is part of the ram overclock enabling higher clock speed along with the three ram over volt settings .
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@cooky069 ah, interesting - thanks. I can never get a stable overclock for the memory, but I have never tried the voltage settings specific to the SD ram.
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There's also a explanation of the different overclock settings on raspberrypi.org in the documentation on boot config.txt , it's about 2/3 of the way down the page
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Thank you all for taking the time to respond. I will have a look at playing with the settings. And I'll have a go at stress testing too and post my findings. :-)
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@cooky069 said in Overclocking with retropie:
Hi there's a section in the retropie wiki to do with overclocking and does have some specific settings for a pi3. One thing I have found through my own overclocking is not to underestimate with the power supply . Most of the posts I've read about it say use a 2.5a supply , I found this is simply insufficient. I would get constant crashing and odd behaviour so went and found myself a nice beefy 5v 10a power supply. I can now run a stable 1400mhz overclock , usb hub , cooling fan and another externally powered usb socket inside my case as well as an led anti vandal switch without any problems.
Do you have a link to the anti vandal switch? I've been trying to find one that uses a 2v LED (powerblock...)
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bear in mind that overclocking the CPU probably won't make any difference to dreamcast emulation, which is GPU-bound. you want to overclock gpu_v3d and possible the memory speed.
IMO overclocking the CPU is pretty meaningless on a pi3, with the emulators in retropie.
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@dankcushions interesting point regarding reicast, thanks.
In general I found that overclocking on the Pi 3 really only helps lr-pcsx_rearmed with enhanced resolution under some circumstances (Gran Turismo 2 really pushes the hardware), but is generally useful for n64 emulation. It also really helps when recording audio/video from retroarch.
I use my Pi 3 also as a lightweight Linux PC with the Raspbian lxde desktop, where overclocking really helps, especially web browsing (chromium), compiling code, ffmpeg transcoding, any graphics work.
That said, I agree that the Pi 3 at a stock 1200mhz is plenty fast ernough for the majority of RetroPie emulators.
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Here are a few tips for overclocking the PI 3 using a passive Heatsink.
Here is a little more extreme cooling using water.
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@RetroResolution said in Overclocking with retropie:
@dankcushions interesting point regarding reicast, thanks.
In general I found that overclocking on the Pi 3 really only helps lr-pcsx_rearmed with enhanced resolution under some circumstances (Gran Turismo 2 really pushes the hardware), but is generally useful for n64 emulation. It also really helps when recording audio/video from retroarch.
I use my Pi 3 also as a lightweight Linux PC with the Raspbian lxde desktop, where overclocking really helps, especially web browsing (chromium), compiling code, ffmpeg transcoding, any graphics work.
That said, I agree that the Pi 3 at a stock 1200mhz is plenty fast ernough for the majority of RetroPie emulators.
What about PPSSPP? Does anyone have insight as to the bottleneck for that emulator? That is, CPU vs GPU...
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@Rion some impressive heatsinks there - water cooling a Pi, now that is an extreme approach!
[Edit] Really interesting videos - 30 degrees Celsius temp drop with the large passive custom copper heatsink is amazing - all four cores at 100% at a sustained 50 degrees Celsius - no thermal throttling. I'd love that!
I wish someone would make a kit comprising a custom case, a large copper heatsink, and a little thermal compound...
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@dankcushions
Would this explain why I'm getting hang ups and freezes on code veronica? I did read cv is very graphics intensive -
@vinylash said in Overclocking with retropie:
@dankcushions
Would this explain why I'm getting hang ups and freezes on code veronica? I did read cv is very graphics intensivei don't think there's a single dreamcast game that runs without some sort of severe issue on the pi 3. GPU just isn't up to it.
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