Raspberry Pi 5 overclocked to 3.6 GHz by ScatterBencher — but exotic cooling didn’t help push clocks any faster than air

Expert overclocker Pieter-Jan Plaisier, AKA ScatterBencher, has again turned his focus to the humble Raspberry Pi. In a recent video walkthrough, the hardcore tech enthusiast prepared a Raspberry Pi 5, alongside a plethora of advanced hardware and software tools, to try and push our favorite single board computer to 4 GHz or beyond. Sadly, ScatterBencher didn’t really achieve what he set out to do, as with all his esoteric cooling craft and lashings of liquid nitrogen he still hit a wall at 3.6 GHz – which had been achievable on a stock device with air cooling.

3.6 GHz Pi 5 | World’s Fastest Raspberry Pi 5 8GB – YouTube

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ScatterBencher’s Raspberry Pi 5 overclocking efforts had previously plateaued at 3.0 GHz on air. Since that time, the expert overclocker consulted with Tom’s Hardware presenter and editor Les Pounder on the Pi Cast. This conversation led him to Jeff Geerling’s guide on the NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) Emulation Patch, which we have also discussed on the site, here.

With software alone – the latest Raspberry Pi OS and the NUMA patch, ScatterBencher saw much better results than he had previously achieved. Early in his video, he shows that it was a cinch to move past 3.0 GHz, using only the latest software and simple air cooling. A graph shows he could get the Raspberry Pi to run nearly 30% faster than stock with appropriate air cooling. The Raspberry Pi 5’s Broadcom BCM2712 SoC runs at a stock frequency of 2.4 GHz.

Satisfied with the software side of things, ScatterBencher naturally anticipated some further steps up the overclocking ladder, setting up at Elmor Labs Taipei office. The first step was to run the Pi with liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooling. Due to the topography of components on the Pi PCB, some LN2 pots that ScatterBencher was familiar with weren’t suitable. However, a thin, tall pot was found which sat nicely on the SoC. A quick test run saw the LN2-cooled Pi SoC achieve 3.2 GHz on LN2, and it could run…