Clock Speeds of Raspberry Pi 5 and Heating/Cooling Raspberry Pi 5
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Overclocking and *Underclocking* the Raspberry Pi 5
The BCM2712 SoC's defaults are 2.4 GHz, and 800 MHz, respectively; so by the numbers, one should expect 25% better CPU performance, and 22% better GPU performance.
In reality, the results are a slight bit less, and heavy use can result in instability, especially if you don't have very adequate cooling (even beyond the already-great Active Cooler).
I overclocked the alpha board I was sent (which did not go through the same final production quality controls as the ones many other reviewers have), and could get a stable overclock at 2.6 GHz, with some stability at 2.8 GHz. At 3.0 GHz, my board exhibited strange behaviors and couldn't complete any benchmarks.
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Heating and cooling Raspberry Pi 5
For normal usage of your Raspberry Pi, adding cooling is entirely optional. The idle performance of a Raspberry Pi 4 and a Raspberry Pi 5 is about the same, and under typical loads Raspberry Pi 5 will run cooler than a similarly loaded Raspberry Pi 4. However, a heavy continuous load will mean that the board could potentially go into thermal throttling. Throttling happens as there are software controls to limit CPU speeds if things get start to get too toasty. Although, even when fully throttled, a Raspberry Pi 5 is still going to run faster than a Raspberry Pi 4!