Stress Testing You Raspberry Pi (for Cooling and Overclocking)

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21

Pi’s have a dynamic clock speed, it will usually idle around 600MHz and only bump up to max speed when required for performance. If it gets hot enough though, the thermal protection will kick in and throttle the clock speed right back.

So it is likely either that your CPU is not under load, or it is overheating.

Short of running your Pi in an oven the thermal protection will prevent any damage, but extra cooling can allow you to run faster for longer.

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22

OK. It isn’t overheating (not even hitting 50C) so how can I put it under moderate load to test it?

23

4 posts were merged into an existing topic: How to Stress Test Temperature on Raspberry Pi (Stressberry)

24

Running a stress test will do it. This forum topic is linked to an article on exactly that:

You would need to make sure you’re following every step in the stressberry article for that to work, from beginning to end.

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25

Raspbian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye). I have managed to overclock the pi to 2.5GHz but right now I have it back at 1.4GHz.
Output is:
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ while true; do vcgencmd measure_clock arm; vcgencmd measure_temp; sleep 10; done& stress -c 4 -t 900s
[1] 3425
stress: info: [3426] dispatching hogs: 4 cpu, 0 io, 0 vm, 0 hdd
frequency(48)=600000000
temp=38.6’C
frequency(48)=600000000
temp=41.3’C
frequency(48)=600000000
temp=41.9’C
frequency(48)=600000000
temp=41.9’C
frequency(48)=600000000
temp=42.9’C
frequency(48)=600000000
temp=42.9’C
frequency(48)=600000000
temp=42.9’C
frequency(48)=600000000
temp=42.9’C
frequency(48)=600000000
temp=43.5’C
frequency(48)=600000000
temp=44.0’C
frequency(48)=600000000
temp=43.5’C
(I changed my hostname etc. back to the default for privacy reasons)
I am using a 30mm2 cooling fan and a 15mm2 heatsink fixed to the Broadcom chip using thermal tape.

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