How to overclock raspberry pi zero

Many people nowadays know what is the raspberry pi, these devices are small computers with little power, compact and with very low power consumption, this makes them ideal for a large number of projects. Many other people know what is Arduino controller cards, which are also widely used in electronics projects, but, the big difference between these devices is the power, and therefore the concept for which they were created, in this case by the Raspberry Pi we have a fully functional PC, with his own storage memory, operating system, processor, RAM memories, GPU… And all this in a plate that can fit in one hand, instead the Arduino controllers have a microcontroller which is responsible to handle the instructions that we ordered by loading code from the Arduino IDE itself, that means that we need a PC to send instructions to the Arduino at least once.

Having arrived at this clarification it is necessary to explain why we would be interested in overclocking a Raspberry Pi Zero, in this case, it’s one of the smallest mini PCs in the market and for that reason, it cannot have much computing power because otherwise the temperatures it would trigger and the processor and it would burn.

As we have explained above, overclocking is not something that can be done just like that, for this we will need our project to have very specific characteristics and not exceed the base frequency by 10%. To begin with, we will need the plate to be in some site well cooled, and that can be refrigerated, since the high frequencies of the processor will cause the temperatures to rise, and these should be dissipated from some way. This overclock would be efficient if you are going to have the raspberry submerged under water with some kind of repellent or insulator. Otherwise, if the plate will be in a warm and poorly cooled place, it is best to leave it like this and even do the reverse process (underclock) in order to help the plate to maintain correct temperatures.

Once given all the warnings and introductions I will proceed to explain how we can modify the frequency of our plate to increase performance (we will lose the guarantee).

Having installed Raspbian we open with administrator permissions the file located in /boot/config.txt and modify the following parameters (this will work with all Raspberry devices)

# 10% overclock

arm_freq = 1100

over_voltage = 8

sdram_freq = 500

sdram_over_voltage = 2

force_turbo = 1

boot_delay = 1

 

Next, we save the file and restart the machine. You have now overclock raspberry pi zero.