Overclocking the Pi3b+ GPU (Results)

pjft

@quicksilver There's a log for the "current" session on ~/.emulationstation/es_log.txt (and there's a log for the previous session as well, which is likely es_log.txt.old or something, in case you restart ES before getting the log).

It might not have anything useful, though, but it's certainly worth a shot.

Efriim

@quicksilver
Right after I replied to you about your ES crash. I have been using Ubuntu x86 Retropie for a while, anyway I booted up my raspberry pi the next morning and the first screen I see is ES has crashed. I still don't know what it was, I remember I had some experimental settings that I wanted to change first boot, but it was nothing extreme.

I'm testing sdram_freq=650. P=8 I=6 C=4, schmoo=none, 0x0?

I realized that all of the core frequencies have a great effect on the sdram stability.
Where gpu over 500 was too much, I set it to default 300, and have not had any problems.

~~I think the sdram controller doesn't work right at more than over voltage 4. Could use some more testing.~~

With
gpu_freq=300
core_freq=600
sdram_freq=650
over_voltage_sdram_p=8
over_voltage_sdram_i=6
over_voltage_sdram_c=4

So far passed memtester (100M x 3) (20M x 10), need to try more between boots.

As a side note, 300GPU didn't seem to effect n64 noticeably.

~~However switch to an x2 interlaced resolution did improve the 3d stuttering and lag by quite a lot. It didn't fix the sound stuttering during some loadscreens etc. though.~~ nevermind, that doesn't make sense, it must have been my vm settings or some fluke.

Efriim

I apologize for the quintuple post.

I discovered last week that it is possible to dial in a specific voltage, by entering the number in micro volts to the config. For example using 31250 (1 step and 6250uV) will give you voltage 1.2313V +AVS. The only exception to this is the sdram_physical which appears to only go by step and refuses to be set to 1.2000V with sdram_min. However if you entered exactly between the steps; 37500 (1 step and 12500(1/2step)) and 37501(1.5steps+1uV); the sdram voltage will read 1.2250V and 1.2500V respectively. Suggesting it is taking some consideration in the rounding or reading.

sdram_freq=667 over_voltage_sdram_(p=7)(i=7)(c=4)
It passed a number of single-threaded tests, multi threaded tasks were a failure and especially with a high arm_freq. As for its usability I'd call it unreliable and not recommended until a different configuration is explored.

quicksilver

@Efriim I haven't been on my pi since yesterday so haven't really been able to check yet but since I'm getting crashing at stock speeds I'm thinking my issue is not related to my overclock. If it crashes again I'm hoping the ES system log will note something.

With recent firmware (within the last year or so?) schmoo=0x02000020 is set automatically if your sdram is overclocked to 500mhz or greater.

Edit: so ES just crashed again. I don't see anything out of the ordinary in the log unfortunately. Not sure what to do next.

Efriim

@quicksilver
Did you uninstall the Carbon Default Theme? I did and I seem to remember it crashing because of that a long time ago, usually right after I update and it checks the resources there for some reason.
Or it could be the OMX player or a video or another resource, try reinstalling your theme.
I don't know what caused my ES crash either.

I tested with the schmoo value on again, the kernel memory crashes on the first 100M run, it lets you know pretty early on. It won't crash without schmoo, but maybe I should find a different memory test app.
Maybe it is auto-configured, yet not necessarily 0x02000020
Maybe that it is not working with 0x02000020 is a good sign that it is bad configuration.

quicksilver

So I discovered the es crash issue only occurred if I was on the game select menu after about 15 minutes or so. It didn't occur sitting on the system select carousel menu.

I ended up reflashing my card to a back up I made a few weeks ago and left my pi on all day and just checked it just now and it was still running fine. Only thing I can think of is that I updated something or made some other change that made ES unstable.

Edit: Im thinking it was an apt-get update/upgrade that screwed things up. I need to stop messing with things on my pi and just play games :)

Efriim

@quicksilver
I don't know what caused the ES to crash on my side, I remember updating to retropie 4.4.11 and then lr-pcsx. I think the last thing I was doing with it was using my phones rndis usb ethernet(USB tether) using android ip neighbor or reading the /proc/net/arp cache to get the remote ip address and connect to the pi with ssh.

I furthered my testing of the 667mhz sdram. Opening 3 ssh and running 3 simultaneous memtesters at the same time on 3 of the 4 cores. Running all four cores gave me low-voltage warnings, and well... failures. I cheated though - I lowered the arm_freq to 1450, running multiple cores and this ram didn't seem to like above 1525mhz(I could have tried over_voltage=2 but I don't think letting the cpu use more volts is going to help low-voltage). Anyway it passed, (100M 4)(3xSSH) and (5M 10)(3xSSH) simultaneous ssh connections.

And it had two failures with (100M 4)(4xSSH). Failure on the first SSH on the first loop on Bit Flip 157, it didn't stop the sequence, the rest of the test continued. Failure on the second SSH on the third loop on Bit Flip 154. Then the test completed. And it had one failure with (5M 10)(4xSSH) on the third SSH on loop4 Bit Flip 154.

I don't know where to go from there, I want to get the arm_cpu back up to 1.5ghz. I should try to adjust the sdram voltage beyond or below 774 the tests are getting longer, I'd like to see less than 1 failure.

I should just play video games too.

Riverstorm

Just to add to the list. I'm also experiencing ES crashes sitting on the game selection screen. I receive the message about memory and default theme and type exit to reload and it seems fine. I've never had an issue before not a single crash but now it's crashed 3 times in the past week running on a Pi 3, Retropie 4.4.11, RA 1.7.6 & ES 2.8.2.

Brunnis

After a brief pause, I've started running some tests again. I just concluded a test of letting my Pi idle at the system selection screen for 8 days with the following settings:

sdram_freq = 500
over_voltage_sdram = 6

No crash or other issues. In a previous test at 500 MHz but with no over voltage, it did crash. So it seems SDRAM over voltage does grant some additional headroom. Running a test now at 530 MHz. 550 MHz is not stable even with over voltage at 6 (tested previously as well).

Regarding the discussion around ES instability: So far, I've seen nothing to suggest that ES itself is unstable in my setup (ES 2.7.6, only NES and SNES games, default theme).

Efriim

@Brunnis
What is the make of the pi3b+
Honest the default value for sdram is 500mhz *though lpddr2 is 400mhz
and honest the schmoo value if set has crashed my system numerous times.
but also over_voltage_sdram setting is too high for the controller.
using
over_voltage_sdram_c = (Controller) 2-4 should suffice and not halt the system
over_voltage_sdram_i = (I/O bus) esoteric voltage relevance, ive seen this setting on par with the controller but I have mine equal to the physical
over_voltage_sdram_p = (Physical) needed for ??? mhz
as far as the default voltages, I think they are C=2 I=2 P=1

Though maybe you are on to something, I have not tested extensively with 500mhz sdram

I've had 1 more ES crash in the past couple weeks, randomly. (ES 2.8.2 variable games and dos folders, switch theme)
updating to ES 2.8.2 will enable the built-in scraper to work.

Brunnis

@Efriim said in Overclocking the Pi3b+ GPU (Results):

What is the make of the pi3b+

I believe it's an RS board.

@Efriim said in Overclocking the Pi3b+ GPU (Results):

Honest the default value for sdram is 500mhz *though lpddr2 is 400mhz

No, the default was 500 MHz at Pi 3 B+ release. It was later lowered to 450 MHz due to instability on some boards. And, seeing how my board is not able to run at 500 MHz with default voltage, that was probably a wise decision.

@Efriim said in Overclocking the Pi3b+ GPU (Results):

also over_voltage_sdram setting is too high for the controller

It's probably unnecessary, but it's also probably not harmful. I'm guessing that neither controller nor I/O voltage need to be set particularly high. As far as I know, the physical voltage is the voltage supplied to the actual RAM chip and also the one most likely to affect stability.

quicksilver

@Riverstorm have you updated anything in the past few weeks? I had stupidly done a apt-get update/upgrade and this made my ES very unstable. It would crash on the game selection screen without fail after about 10-15 minutes. After reverting to a back up it apparently has fixed my issue. But I will continue to monitor.

Riverstorm

@quicksilver - I didn't do any apt-get/upgrade but I did update pretty much everything else. The RetroPie script then all the core components (Retroarch, Emulationstation, RetroPie Menu and Runcommand).

System = Pi 3 Model B
RetroPie = 4.4.11
Retroarch = 1.7.6
Emulationstation 2.8.2RP
RetroPie Menu = ?
Runcommand = ?

Using your Q3 test for about 20-22 hours of burn-in here's the best I could get from my board. There might be a bit more headroom in there but I figured a little "padding" is probably good and also I didn't want to start doing tiny increments for hours of testing. It's been rock solid for well over a year+ until this past week or so. I had to push my over voltage to 6 but it runs cool with a BIQU case. Actually cooler than a Flirc could provide.

# CPU Overclock
arm_freq=1325
over_voltage=6

# GPU Overclock
gpu_freq=500

# RAM Overclock
sdram_freq=550
sdram_schmoo=0x02000020
over_voltage_sdram_p=6
over_voltage_sdram_i=4
over_voltage_sdram_c=4

All this started after updating. Last night I played a game of Bump 'n' Jump from the Favorites menu and had to do a few things. When I came back it was crashed. I did read your comment and did let it idle at the carousel for 3 or so hours last night with no issue. It seems to be the game selection menu but not all the time for me. I will keep an eye out and if I find anything relevant I'll let you know. It's some type of intermittent issue it seems.

I wish after a crash it would "auto-restart" or at least try. Using an arcade panel or controller with no keyboard is a bit painful to get ES restarted after a crash.

I might need to rebuild or rollback to a really old image as it's several months old. Rebuilding from scratch is just a long process but might be a necessary evil here. =/

mitu

@Riverstorm said in Overclocking the Pi3b+ GPU (Results):

I wish after a crash it would "auto-restart" or at least try. Using an arcade panel or controller with no keyboard is a bit painful to get ES restarted after a crash.

Do you have an error message on the screen, after the crash ? Or maybe a crash log from Emulationstation in ~/.emulationstation/es_log.txt ?

Riverstorm

@mitu - The message is from ES. It's a nice clean message. It's the standard blue box, the message and an 'OK' button. I don't remember the wording verbatim (probably easy to find in the script) but it's says something about checking your memory and reverting to the default carbon theme. You click ok and it drops you back to the prompt. I hook up a keyboard type 'exit' and it reloads ES.

I don't have the image with me right now but I will check if it has anything in the logs and will post later this afternoon.

I am using the defaults which I think is 256MB of memory and I always use just the standard carbon theme so that's definitely not the issue.

Also congrats on Global Mod. You deserve it with your knowledge and "windshield" time. You're like a super ninja--everywhere! ;)

I'll have to open an issue at some point as I think you did a lot of work with Skyscraper? Anyway it scraps perfect for me but when shutting down I get some weird errors and it locks hard on me. It was pretty consistent and reproducible but I kind of set it aside for now but at some point I want to improve my gamelist.xml as I already upgraded all my snaps to HD which took forever.

mitu

@Riverstorm said in Overclocking the Pi3b+ GPU (Results):

@mitu - The message is from ES. It's a nice clean message. It's the standard blue box, the message and an 'OK' button. I don't remember the wording verbatim (probably easy to find in the script) but it's says something about checking your memory and reverting to the default carbon theme. You click ok and it drops you back to the prompt. I hook up a keyboard type 'exit' and it reloads ES.

Ah, that message. There was an update - a few weeks back - to the SDL libraries used internally by ES which caused a lot of errors. It has been reverted last week (or the week before ?). You can check if you have a faulty SDL by running - from the command line:

dpkg -l | grep libsdl

If it shows something like:

[...]
ii  libsdl2-dev:armhf                    2.0.9+1rpi                     armhf

then you have the update with problems. Update again your RetroPie-Setup script, then do an update for the Emulationstation package, it should revert to the previous SDL version, which shouldn't have these problems.

Also congrats on Global Mod. You deserve it with your knowledge and "windshield" time. You're like a super ninja--everywhere! ;)

Thanks.

I'll have to open an issue at some point as I think you did a lot of work with Skyscraper? Anyway it scraps perfect for me but when shutting down I get some weird errors and it locks hard on me. It was pretty consistent and reproducible but I kind of set it aside for now but at some point I want to improve my gamelist.xml as I already upgrade all my snaps to HD which took forever.

You should post in the Skyscraper module topic - https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/19588/. The module was submitted - and is maintained - by me, so I'm interested in any errors regarding its functionality.

Efriim

@Brunnis
This all makes sense. I set 400mhz and 450mhz sdram for a time, and then adopted 600mhz from another's configuration and now I'm testing 667mhz.

Would you care to attempt:
sdram_freq=600
over_voltage_sdram_c=3
over_voltage_sdram_i=3
over_voltage_sdram_p=6
#no schmoo
?

@mitu Congratulation Mitu
I can't say I didn't notice but I don't know if it is the same.
I think I was just a noob when you got your first promotion and you're quite good at knowing and understanding where the problems are the first time.

Brunnis

@Efriim 600 MHz is a no go. Same with 550 MHz. All my tests so far are without touching the schmoo setting. Somewhere between 500 and 550 MHz is probably the practical limit for the RAM on my particular board.

Riverstorm

@mitu - Thanks a bunch for the information. The results are posted below. It looks like I do need to update. I posted here because I saw few others with the same issue and thought it might be OC related but it doesn't look like it. If it happens after the update I'll open a new issue.

@quicksilver - Thanks for the information too. I'll monitor and let you know you if I see it again. Usually ES is rock solid so it had my really wondering after updating and all these crashes started that had never been an issue before.

ii  libsdl2-2.0-0:armhf                  2.0.9+1rpi                        armhf
Simple DirectMedia Layer
hi  libsdl2-dev:armhf                    2.0.9+1rpi                        armhf
Simple DirectMedia Layer development files

quicksilver

@Riverstorm so my output was the same as yours. Is "ii" different from "hi"? "hi" is what mine says. @mitu post shows "ii"