Safely overclocking your Raspberry Pi

Safely might be a slight overstatement but I have been in the overclocking business for a long time now. I did not really consider overclocking my Raspberry until I read some post than claimed that OpenElec (which is what I use) had gained some serious speed by doing so.

My hardware is a Raspberry Pi Type B, so your mileage may vary, you should always be extra careful before changing stock settings. You should also read the overclocking guide. Unlike the copy/paste values in the link, I have not over volted the device because, it is very bad for hardware if you don’t need to and, you will lose your warranty.

So I ended up picking slightly safer settings, you will first need to SSH to the device then remount the flash partition with write permissions

mount -o remount,rw /flash

Then edit the file in /flash/config.txt and uncomment the following lines and change the values like this:

arm_freq=850
core_freq=325
sdram_freq=425

Then save and reboot the device. You can check the running speed of the CPU by doing cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq or vcgencmd measure_clock arm.

The beauty of it is that it is dynamic overclocking so only when the device needs speed will it boost, especially during boot, scan of libraries and parsing of medias. When playing movies, unless it lags, it will remain at 700Mhz.

Happy watching!