I can't set Orange Pi plus 2 clock speed

odluxon · January 24, 2017

I can't set Orange Pi Plus 2 clock speed to 1.54Ghz.
Please fix it

Igor · January 24, 2017

For your good, we wont. Why? Use search. Its not a bug but feature to gain better performace. Yes.

Wrote on mobile phone

odluxon · January 24, 2017

I remember that i had better performance after i set its speed to 1.54 ghz, but the expert is you.

Igor · January 24, 2017

Just use search if you want to understand the background. This overclock is for marketing / quick benchmark tests only. Gain is not noticable by hand.

Wrote on mobile phone

tkaiser · January 24, 2017

I remember that i had better performance after i set its speed to 1.54 ghz, but the expert is you.

Theoretical difference between 1.3 GHz (Armbian) and 1.56 GHz (false marketing and loboris' image settings) is 20 percent. This is nothing you can feel or remember and in case you use your board as some sort of Desktop replacement the performance of most tasks depends more on random I/O performance (storage and not CPU).

Problem with these imaginary 1.56 GHz is that you need to overvolt the H3 SoC (beyond what's allows for H3 according to datasheet) which leads to higher temperatures which leads to either the need for heatsink + fan or the board throttling faster (and therefore being slower).

Without a fan loboris' settings (1.56 GHz @ 1.5V) lead to lower CPU performance compared to Armbian settings (max 1.3 GHz @ 1320 mW) since H3 overheats way more due to being fed with an insanely high VDD_CPUX voltage and runs with lower clockspeeds in reality.

In case you know what you're doing feel free to increase cpufreq limits but you will not gain more CPU performance and reduce longevity.

Further readings:

Please be also aware that Xunlong advertised some H3 boards as being capable to run with 'up to 1.6GHz' but all their OS images limited maximum CPU clockspeed to 1.2 GHz in reality (so called THS settings). It was one 3rd party who started with this insane overvolting/overclocking and months later linux-sunxi community came up with sane settings (using 1.3 GHz max at a reasonable voltage not overheating/damaging the SoC)