If you read my earlier article on overclocking the Raspberry Pi 4, you saw how easy it was to crank the speed up to the max. Commander Pi made it super simple to change settings and get that clock speed up! Unfortunately, TwisterOS is not recommended for the Pi 3B+ and may not even work (I haven’t tried it on the 3B+ at all, but it probably won’t work correctly), so I just edited the settings in the config.txt file using nano. It’s a little bit more involved but not much more difficult. At first, I tried to do 1700 MHz with no success and dialed it back to 1600. That was also a no-go, so I dialed it back another 100 MHz. Success. The GPU was raised to 600 MHz and I also did a slight OC of the RAM. Here are the settings i used:
arm_freq=1500
gpu_freq=600
over_voltage=6
temp_limit=80
sdram_freq=600
sdram_schmoo=0x02000020
over_voltage_sdram_p=6
over_voltage_sdram_i=4
over_voltage_sdram_c=4
total_mem=1023
hdmi_drive=2
Overall, I would have to agree with Hayden James’s article Stop trying to overclock the Raspberry Pi 3 B+. The 3B+ is nearly at its upper limit so I could only get a 100MHz boost from it, which probably won’t give any significant performance gains. Also, the 3B+ gets fairly hot under load even at stock speeds so I recommend passive and active cooling in the form of heatsinks and a fan. A regular 3B might be a better candidate for an overclock, essentially turning the 3B into a stock 3B+. The 3B+ probably will benefit from a GPU/RAM overclock but the CPU might best be left alone. The 100MHz boost probably isn’t going to do much performance-wise and when I tried to go higher than that, Raspbian refused to boot. The 3B is going to be a better candidate if you can indeed boost it to 1500, which I still need to try.
If you have a 3B+ overclocking isn’t totally out of the picture. GPU and RAM can still be overclocked and might give a slight performance boost but overall the model 4 will give you the best overclocking bang for your buck.
Benny's Bits and Bytes 