Adventures with dry ice and RP2350 - how fast can it go? – Pimoroni Learning Portal

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A hands-on experiment pushing the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 (RP2350) to its limits through overclocking, using progressively more extreme methods: starting with voltage adjustments via the onboard regulator, then adding heatsinks and fans, and finally using dry ice cooling at Pimoroni HQ. By injecting external voltage through test point 7 on the board and cooling the chip to around -80°C, the team achieved a peak of 873.5 MHz (from a stock ~150 MHz), compared to the default 1.1V/312 MHz baseline. The article details the test setup using CoreMark benchmarks across both ARM and RISC-V cores (RISC-V showed ~5% better integer performance per MHz), voltage/frequency tables at each stage, and practical observations about thermal limits, voltage regulator constraints, and chip durability. All three Pico 2 boards survived the abuse.

Overclocking Raspberry Pi Pico 2