Raspberry Pi 3 Overclocking and Warranty

Question

I found the following at https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/config-txt/overclocking.md:

The specific circumstances where the overclock bit is set are if force_turbo is set to 1 and any of the over_voltage_* options are set to a value > 0

Does that mean that I can overclock as much as I want if I don't force the Pi3 to run at the set frequency constantly?

Answer 1

Linked just after the paragraph you quoted, it links to this blog post. In that page, it's stated that:

We’ve been doing a lot of work to understand the impact of voltage and temperature on lifetime, and are now able to offer a “turbo mode”, which dynamically enables overclock and overvolt under the control of a cpufreq driver, without affecting your warranty.

So long as you don't set force_turbo, which forces turbo mode to run even when not necessary, the warranty void bit will likely not be set. This is confirmed by one of the engineers at the Foundation, who states:

Note, that overclocking through raspi-config doesn't set your "warranty" bit. What sets the warranty bit now, is:

(force_turbo || current_limit_override || temp_limit>85) && over_voltage>0

So, if you are manually overclocking and want to know what is "allowed", then stick to those config.txt options. If you've already blown your warranty bit, or don't care, then feel free to change anything.

In practice, this means you're limited to a 1.35 V core voltage, because without force_turbo or current_limit_override, you can only set over_voltage to a maximum of 6.

Answer 2

The warranty void flag shouldn't be triggered, as long as you don't force the Pi to operate above 85C through overclocking and force_turbo being off. If you are worried about your warrenty being void, you can check by running cat /proc/cpuinfo. Look for the 'Revision' line. If it is a 4 digit alphanumeric number, the your warrenty isn't void. If the revision starts with 1000, then it is void.