The Kingdom of Philtopia

I was tinkering with the core_freq and v3d_freq options in /boot/config.txt trying to see if I could squeeze any more out of the Raspberry Pi 3.

I started at 600. System booted, splash screen displayed, started to load Emulation station…..Black screen. System froze.

Ok… Back up to 575. Booted, Splash, ES loaded….Graphical artifacts for a few seconds…freeze? Not completely I could still SSH so I backed off the settings again.

550, boot, splash, ES, Able to navigate…No Artifacts… 3D applications work…Jackpot.

So, it’s only a tiny improvement but it still counts.

core_freq=550
v3d_freq=550
h264_freq=333

I tried fiddling with the h264 but it seemed to cause more instability at anything higher. The extra 50 over my previous 500 did give an improvement to 3D rendering on some struggling applications. It’s a significant improvement over the default stock settings as well. The VideoCore IV is underpowered in todays world so every notch on the belt counts.

EDIT: I backed core_freq and v3d_freq down to 525. After a full day of running the Pi became unstable at 550 but 525 has been fine for a couple weeks now.

Get the rest of my settings from my previous post