Raspberry Pi TURBO mode!!!
Remember the olden days where your computer had a turbo button? Running without turbo, actually meant you were underclocking your processor while running with the turbo meant you were running at stock clock speeds? Well that is not how the new Raspberry Pi TURBO mode is!
It looks like the Raspberry Pi foundation has been hard at working testing the Raspberry Pi’s overclocking headroom. Though some hard work, they’ve created 5 overclocking presets for your Raspberry Pi Turbo Mode. The highest preset will push the Raspberry Pi to 1GHz! Assuming that your Pi’s processor and power supply are up to the task!
The best part of the new Raspberry Pi Turbo mode? The Turbo mode boosts the speed of your Raspberry Pi when its need, by overclocking AND overvolting, but WILL NOT void your warranty. Plus the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s benchmarks indicate the the Raspberry Pi Turbo mode @ the highest preset will net you around a 52% increase in performance.
But with any form of overclocking you must be concerned with heat! As a result, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has designed to new Raspberry Pi Turbo mode to throttle/limit your overclock when the Raspberry Pi’s processor hits a toasty 85C. That is pretty hot! For HTPC usage, we don’t think the Raspberry Pi Turbo mode will ever need to throttle. But if you are worried, there are heat sinks you can put on the BCM2835 to help keep it cool.
Unfortunately, these updates are currently only for users running the Raspbian distro. Which means all of the HTPC Raspberry Pi users will need to wait for developers of the distros: Raspbmc, XBian, & OpenElec to incorporate these new settings into their XBMC distros.
Worth the wait? HELL YEA! Admittedly our Raspberry Pi seems to run fine with a mild overclock, but who can resist a Raspberry Pi Turbo mode?!
Category: featured
