Raspberry Pi Can Now Be Overclocked 50% Without Risk

The Raspberry Pi credit card-sized ARM-based computer has received its latest upgrade, and it isn't one that people can easily gloss over. Verily, it may cause them to flock at it even more than before.

After all, it isn't every day that a computer, or any electronic device really, suddenly gains the ability to offer 50% better performance free of charge.

This is precisely what the Raspberry Pi foundation promises, and what was, in fact, possible all along, even before the coming of the 2.0 revision.

Essentially, the board PC can be overclocked, enough to improve performance by half, or less, depending on what preset is selected.

Five presets are available in the config.txt file, the highest of which takes the ARM processor to 1 GHz.

Coincidentally, it is this very text file that could have been edited all along, but doing so would have voided the warranty, since it would have placed stress on the chipset and shortened its lifespan.

Now that the folks at the foundation figured out how to implement certain safeguards, this pitfall no longer applies.

The engineers came up with an automatic scaling feature that allows this turbo mode to come into play only when the system is busy and the temperature is still below 85 degrees Celsius. After editing the config file, the start menu receives some new options.

“What does this mean? Comparing the new image with 1GHz turbo enabled, against the previous image at 700MHz, nbench reports 52% faster on integer, 64% faster on floating point and 55% faster on memory,” says the Rapsberry Pi foundation.

This is where owners of the Pi need to go if they feel up for an upgrade but don't know the instructions. As a bonus, the topic shows how to add Wi-Fi support (assuming they have a USB Wi0Fi dongle) and improve the audio and USB performance. New Raspberry Pi will have all these software changes out of the box.