Getting more performance from an RPi 2

According to the article, “out-of-the-box” RPi 2 performance isn’t quite what it should be.

From the Debian wiki: (https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi)

Overclocking Pi 2
Overclocking is quite easy and convenient, and doesn’t invalidate your warranty if you don’t change voltage.
It happens that the actual L2 speed of the Raspberry Pi 2 is severelly underclocked, making the device much more slower that it should actually be. There has been reports of users using overclocked speeds of the processor and the L2 for months without a single issue, but you must be carefull in respecting a good proportion between L2 speed and processor, and overclocking the RAM is generally not recommended.

Try this setting, it has demonstrated to be stable and doubles the speed of this small machine in general.
Edit /boot/config.txt and substitute or add these lines:

arm_freq=1000
core_freq=500
sdram_freq=400
over_voltage=0
over_voltage_sdram_p=0
over_voltage_sdram_i=0
over_voltage_sdram_c=0

Just to note, that you will probably need at least a 2Amp power supply if you start over clocking.

True, but when you think about it, a 2A PSU is what one should be using anyway. i.e. to leave headroom for USB and other peripherals. For an RPi 2, the recommend PSU current capacity is 1.8A.
Ref: Raspberry Pi Documentation

Depending on what’s connected to the Pi, perhaps not. See the next post.

Out of curiousity, I decided to verify the increase in current. I used a USB power monitor that has digital displays for voltage and current. Here’s the results of some quick testing:

Idling
CPU clk   GPU clk   Current         Temp (C)
900  MHz  250 MHz   0.16 - 0.24 A   47.0 - 47.6
900  MHz  500 MHz   0.17 - 0.27 A   48.6 - 49.2
1000 MHz  500 MHz   0.17 - 0.27 A   48.6 - 49.2

All cores running at 100%
900  Mhz  250 MHz   0.38 - 0.48 A   70.2 - 71.2
900  MHz  500 MHz   0.38 - 0.49 A   73.9 - 74.5
1000 MHz  500 MHz   0.41 - 0.49 A   76.6 - 77.2

Distributed.net’s OGR-NG client was used to push the CPU cores to 100%
Voltage swing was from 5.11 to 5.12 Volts.
The OS is Minibian Wheezy loaded on a 4GB SD card.
A USB keyboard and wired LAN connection were used.
An HDMI-to-DVI cable was connected to a monitor with a DVI input.
No other peripherals were connected.
The RPi was unmodified. i.e. no heatsinks, but was enclosed in a plastic case.
Room temperature was 26.6C


Contents of /boot/config.txt:

gpu_mem=16
arm_freq=1000
core_freq=500
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=19
hdmi_force_hotplug=1
initial_turbo=60
force_turbo=1
disable_splash=1

The results were a surprise. I expected a much larger increase in current demand.

Did it increase the processor temp significantly?

Paul

About 6C at full load, 1-1.5C at idle. (I added the temp data to the table in my post)

I took out the 1100 MHz data. That was me wondering how fast can this puppy go?