Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Some of the games seem slow
You can overclock your Raspberry Pi to eke out extra performance and speed.
Warning: overclocking can corrupt your SD card, requiring you to reload Raspbian on it. If
your Raspberry Pi seems to be unresponsive, reboot and hold down the
Shift
key to tempor-
arily reset the overclock settings. Go through the following steps to overclock your Rasp-
berry Pi:
1. Run
sudo raspi-config
from the command line.
2. Select
Overclock
from the main menu.
3. Select the lowest overclock.
4. Reboot and check the performance.
5. If it is still slow, select the next overclock setting.
6. If the game still runs at an unacceptable performance, the best bet is to post to the
Raspberry Pi forums. As the Raspberry Pi platform matures, new enhancements
and performance tweaks will be available.
By default, the Raspberry Pi runs at 700 MHz but has the capability to be overclocked to a
higher speed. Most Raspberry Pis have been noted to be working fine at 900 MHz and
some even higher than 1 GHz. Overclocking the CPU with
raspi-config
automatically
throttles the speed, as required. So, when not in use, it reduces power down to 700 MHz.
Even with the throttle, overclocking can make your system unstable and can lead to SD
card corruption. If your system fails to boot after overclocking, holding down
Shift
tries to
turn off the overclocking in the software. If this does not work, you can edit the
/boot/
config.txt
file and set
arm_freq = 700
to disable overclocking. If all else fails,
you can reimage your SD card. All overclocking information is stored in
config.txt
,
and reimaging your card will reset it.
