Brazilian overclocker breaks Raspberry Pi bench record at Hwbot

A Brazilian has achieved a score of 855.04 points with the Hwbot Prime benchmark by overclocking a Raspberry Pi Zero. He achieved the record by overclocking the CPU of the mini computer from 1GHz to 1600MHz.

That’s not the highest CPU clock speed of the Broadcom BCM2835 CPU in Hwbot’s ranking, which stands at 1620MHz, but the number two on the list managed ‘only’ 849.52 points in the benchmark with that speed, because he managed to get the memory clocks less high.

Alex Rissato describes on his blog how he initially only got the Raspberry Pi Zero stable at 1100MHz, but managed to boot at 1200MHz. For higher clock speeds, he had to make hardware changes: the barrier that puts the maximum voltage at 1.4V had to be removed and the Brazilian soldered an external source for the core voltage. He then placed the CPU on a Peltier element, the hot side of which he placed in a container of cold water with salt.

He set the record at a voltage of about 2.06V and at temperatures between 15 and 16.4 degrees Celsius.