@Folly Thank you so much for the info!!!! I'm going to buy a better power supply.

Rob

@trailjacker said in Lightning Bolt / General Electronic Question:

Many users worry that that they may "supply too much power" by using a higher rated supply.

Yes, because they do not understand that in electronics, a device will draw the current that it demands. For example, I buy a green LED. It requires 25mA to illuminate. I decide to power it with a 3A power supply. The power supply laughs at it and delivers the 25mA with 2.975A spare capacity to power other things like a Pi.

@thewinterdojer said in How to determine how much over_voltage is needed? [Overclock]:

It almost doesn't seem like it's worth increasing your thresholds through overclocking without enabling performance mode...

That's just from my experience with Ondemand and limited testing. When a game is idle (under the hood) it will downclock to I think it's 600Mhz then kick back up when needed so games on that threshold or even when they need just a small "kick" over the idle clock speed for even a moment it has to clock up and down. I think like TMNT pointed out if you like how it's working I wouldn't worry to much about using Ondemand vs Peformance.

The performance gain on many games might be small but the trade-off if only marginal is worth it to me. Even if the Pi went the way of a singe-o-matic puff of smoke after 6 months. That hasn't been the case though. Instead of guessing where a few extra Mhz of speed might be needed/beneficial I figure juice them all as the electric bill will still only be a few pennies more. I think our rate here is .07 per kilowatt and the Pi is so modestly priced that it has paid for itself month after month of gaming. We usually spend quite a bit more for one evening out vs the cost of one Pi.

I was messing with Soul Caliber which doesn't really work on the Pi at all but you could see the effects of the up/down clocking. The tearing and stuttering would go from awful to horrendous. Lot's of yo-yoing! I was running a small script that shows the speed, temp, etc. and then used watch cgu_temp on a separate monitor to see it kicking up and down. The thought is you can find games that kind of give you an idea how that setting works and how you want to leverage it.

I have to enabled it through the runcommand menu on a emulator by emulator basis correct?

I would imagine you could enable it for just the emulators you want to boost. I set it globally via RetroPie Setup right in ES.

RetroPie Setup C Configuration / Tools 825 runcommand - The 'runcommand' launch script - needed for launching the emulators from the frontend 5 CPU configuration 6 Force performance

I made the observation in the past that using a high-quality USB cable also plays a major role: A thicker cable leads to a lower voltage drop when the Rai needs a lot of power. You might want to try out another cable.

I know this is an old thread, but I'm replying here because it's the first "open" result on a related Google search.
I wrote a quick script that I'd like to share for quickly parsing the above into a user-readable format

Sample output:

Status: 0x50005 Undervolted: Now: YES Run: YES Throttled: Now: YES Run: YES Frequency Capped: Now: NO Run: NO

Script:

#!/bin/bash #Flag Bits UNDERVOLTED=0x1 CAPPED=0x2 THROTTLED=0x4 HAS_UNDERVOLTED=0x10000 HAS_CAPPED=0x20000 HAS_THROTTLED=0x40000 #Text Colors GREEN=`tput setaf 2` RED=`tput setaf 1` NC=`tput sgr0` #Output Strings GOOD="${GREEN}NO${NC}" BAD="${RED}YES${NC}" #Get Status, extract hex STATUS=$(vcgencmd get_throttled) STATUS=${STATUS#*=} echo -n "Status: " (($STATUS!=0)) && echo "${RED}${STATUS}${NC}" || echo "${GREEN}${STATUS}${NC}" echo "Undervolted:" echo -n " Now: " ((($STATUS&UNDERVOLTED)!=0)) && echo "${BAD}" || echo "${GOOD}" echo -n " Run: " ((($STATUS&HAS_UNDERVOLTED)!=0)) && echo "${BAD}" || echo "${GOOD}" echo "Throttled:" echo -n " Now: " ((($STATUS&THROTTLED)!=0)) && echo "${BAD}" || echo "${GOOD}" echo -n " Run: " ((($STATUS&HAS_THROTTLED)!=0)) && echo "${BAD}" || echo "${GOOD}" echo "Frequency Capped:" echo -n " Now: " ((($STATUS&CAPPED)!=0)) && echo "${BAD}" || echo "${GOOD}" echo -n " Run: " ((($STATUS&HAS_CAPPED)!=0)) && echo "${BAD}" || echo "${GOOD}"