How do you check your temps?

jay81uk

:-(

That can't happen from overclocking... can it?

herb_fargus

well I've never heard of it happening yet so I think you'll be alright. always good to have heatsinks at least and some good ventilation if you're going to be overclocking

Riverstorm

@herb_fargus said in How do you check your temps?:

if you're overheating you'll see a bright red square in the upper corner, followed by magic smoke out the pi, followed by real smoke, followed by bursting into flames, which then proceed to burn your curtains, and then before you know it the room is engulfed, babies are crying, firetrucks are arriving, the firemen come out to find a new bmw parked in front of the fire hydrant, they promptly smash both windows of the bmw to route the hose, and then before you know it the neighbours are roasting mallows on the ashes of your home. Then I end up in court because I didnt tell you how to find the temp of your pi which could have resolved this whole ordeal in the first place.

Owning a Pi 35 dollars...having a sense of humor when your Pi starts on fire...PRICELESS! For everything else there's RetroPie... :)

PokeEngineer

@herb_fargus @Riverstorm
😂 LMAO!!!

jay81uk

Well I'm overclocking to 1.4ghz and Mario Kart 64 doesn't look any different. Still laggy at the main menu but plays normally during games.

Not sure how overclocking will benefit N64 really.

What's a safe temperature? Overclocking and playing Mario Kart I'm 50'c

lilbud

@herb_fargus I hope you are not speaking from experience.

bazmonkey

I think easiest-to-remember way is to run ". ./.bashrc", which re-triggers the code that makes the welcome message, which includes temp.

RetroResolution

@bazmonkey I combine watch and vcgencmd to periodically view the temps (e.g. every second) - generally I'll connect via ssh from another device (windows, running PuTTY, android device using Juice SSH etc)

watch -n 1 vcgencmd measure_temp

There's a whole slew of related commands that are useful for monitoring the core voltages, clock speeds etc.

@jay81uk 1.4ghz is one hell of an overclock. Are you using active cooling?

I had mine at 1350 for five months before I determined for certain that it wasn't actually 100 per cent stable; it took a series of 24 hour soak test (no overclocking, cpu overclocking only, gpu overclocking etc) to nail this down.

I found that 1300mhz is as far as I can push it, mainly as I use the Pi for multicore tasks (including ffmpeg video encoding, and recently C# development using mono and monodevelop IDE). The GPU is stable at 500, but the ram absolutely will not overclock (I have the same issue with my Pi 2).

As the RetroArch emulator cores / standalone emulators in RetroPie are designed for single core operation, the temperature of the SoC remains relatively low, and keeps the system stable.

jay81uk

@RetroResolution I overclocked to 1.4ghz - only a .2ghz increase.
I have two heatsinks and the lid off my pi. I was only playing an N64 game though so nothing incredibly demanding.

In terms of N64 games, the difference wasn't that much - certainly not worth risking damaging my Pi. Surprised Mario Kart 64 was still slightly laggy on the main menu - wouldn't have thought this would happen if the main game ran perfect.

ronlaws86

@jay81uk the chip is rated to go up to 80C, above which it will display an amber followed by red square, I've also overclocked my Pi3 to 1.35Ghz (i was at 1.4 but I went back to this due to stability issues) it is also possible to overclock the GPU and RAM too which helps a little.

these are my settings if you are interested. (mandatory disclaimer, not my fault if your pi catches fire)

#Overclock Settings
#CPU
arm_freq=1350
over_voltage=6
temp_limit=80
core_freq=500

#GPU
h264_freq=333
avoid_pwm_pll=1
gpu_mem=450
v3d_freq=500

#Ram
sdram_freq=500
sdram_schmoo=0x02000020
over_voltage_sdram_p=6
over_voltage_sdram_i=4
over_voltage_sdram_c=4

edit: I should also mention i have a very large heatsink on my pi, as it over heats at these settings very easily.

mrbwa1

I usually SSH in and use the command:
/opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp

If I am trying to profile while running games, I will use the command:
watch /opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp

The watch command will update the temp every 2 seconds in the SSH window (use ctrl+C to exit out of the watch command).

Riverstorm

@mrbwa1 said in How do you check your temps?:

The watch command will update the temp every 2 seconds in the SSH window

I find the watch command very handy. I do the same in a putty SSH window running this script even though there's plenty of built-in commands without the need but I like the formatted output.

#!/bin/bash
cpuSpeed0=$(cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq)
cpuSpeed1=$(($cpuSpeed0/1000))

cpuTemp0=$(cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp)
cpuTemp1=$(($cpuTemp0/1000))
cpuTemp2=$(($cpuTemp0/100))
cpuTempM=$(($cpuTemp2 % $cpuTemp1))

gpuTemp0=$(/opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp)
gpuTemp0=${gpuTemp0//\'/°}
gpuTemp0=${gpuTemp0//temp=/}

echo
echo CPU Speed: $cpuSpeed1" MHz"
echo
echo CPU Temp: $cpuTemp1"."$cpuTempM"°C"
echo GPU Temp: $gpuTemp0