It took a while for me to jump on board of the Raspberry Pi wagon. For one, I am not a software guy and have very little understanding of Linux. Two, the Raspberry Pi is so small that overclocking almost seems impossible. However, because Frederik – RichBa5tard, owner of HWBOT – is so enthusiastic about the Raspberry Pi and the overclocking fun it brings along, I decided to go ahead and try it out anyway. With the HWBOT Prime application ready for cross-platform performance comparison, I already had a tool to benchmark the Raspberry Pi and see the performance scaling when overclocking.
In the end, the Raspberry Pi went up from about 160PPS (“Primes per Second”) at stock frequency to the current high of 568PPS. Of course, the process of performance increase does not only involve hardware tweaking – “Overclocking” – but also software tweaking. In this editorial, I will describe my Raspberry Pi experience and provide a basic guide for those who want to get involved in Raspberry Pi and ARM overclocking!
Page1: Step1 – Gathering all components.
Page1: Step2 – Installing the software.
Page1: How to save and submit with HWBOT Prime?
Page2: Step3 – Overclocking and benching.
Step1 – Gathering all components.
You can buy the Raspberry Pi through a couple of resellers. I found one in the local Guang Hua computer department store. The official price is USD $25 for Model A and USD $35 for Model B, but this excludes shipping and reseller charges. Model A has 256MB RAM, one USB port and no Ethernet (network connection), whereas Model B has 512MB RAM, two USB ports and an Ethernet port. I would definitely recommend acquiring Model B as it makes the entire overclocking process a lot easier. I did not buy an external PSU because I am using a nearby PC system as power source via USB. This seems to work very well and since I am not planning to use the Raspberry Pi for anything else than overclocking, I figured I do not need a separate power source.
Once you found all the components, it is easy to assemble. Plug in all the connectors and you are done!
Step2 – Installing the software.
When I first assembled the Raspberry Pi, I figured this would be the most difficult part of getting started. It turns out it’s actually quite simple as long as you follow the instructions and are not scared of doing a little bit of debugging work. Even though Frederik argued otherwise, Linux is not as easy as Windows to get started with. There are many ways to get your RPi up and running, but I will just stick to what worked for me. You know, this is just a guide to get started.
Once you have everything downloaded, do the following.
The image will now be written onto the SD Card. Depending on the speed of your system and the SD Card, this can take a couple of minutes. Note that you can also read an SD Card. This is a particularly handy feature to save your overclocking configuration and software installation when you found the magic settings. I have made an image file of the operating system I achieved my highest score with.
For more information on the SD Card preparation, refer to this page: http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup. Their guide helped me figure it out the first time.
Once the flash has finished, you are ready to boot up the Raspberry Pi!
Expand Filesystem – this option will make the entire SD Card storage space available to Raspberry Pi. I forgot this once and ran out of storage when installing other software.
Enable Boot To Desktop – No. I find the command line to be much easier to use when overclocking the RPi. Not only is it easier to configure the overclock, it also seems more efficient and thus better for benchmark scores.
Once you logged in, you can start installing the software for benchmarking. Before we continue, I would like to give you a couple of commands that might be useful throughout the guide.
shutdown -r now: command to reboot the Raspberry Pi if Super User mode enabled. You can also reboot with CTRL+ALT+DEL.
As mentioned earlier, for overclocking and benchmarking we will be using the command line. For uploading the result later on, we can use the GUI mode. I will explain how to later on. First, let us install all the software we need for overclocking.
If the command is not recognised, try the update command, followed by another install command.
Once again, try if Java has been installed correctly. Everything should be working now. For your convenience, I have uploaded a Raw image of the Raspbian Wheezy operating system with HWBOT Prime 0.8.3 and Java JDK7 pre-installed. You can download it here. I would recommend trying the manual way first, if not out of pride at least to familiarize yourself with the Linux environment and commands.
How to save and submit with HWBOT Prime?
HWBOT Prime is an internal benchmark we prepared to demonstrate our new open API for benchmark applications. The central idea of the open API is to allow benchmark developers to submit benchmark data files securely to HWBOT. Not only do they have easy rankings for their benchmarks, the secured data file prevents easy tampering with screenshots. As data file submission is central in this approach, the only way to submit an HWBOT Prime benchmark result is via data file. We do this by either saving a file and uploading it manually later, or submitting directly from the application. Both can be done from the command line.
The operating system comes with a browser called ‘Midori’. This browser allows you to submit a result to HWBOT in the way you know all too well. When selecting the data file, make sure to browse to the right folder. If you followed the instructions of this guide, the file is saved under /home/pi. Select, upload, and enjoy your new benchmark score! We are now ready to start overclocking and really push this little thing.