Rockchip’s RK3188 quad-core processor is already one of the most powerful ARM Cortex-A9 processors on the market. But it turns out you can make it even faster.

Out of the box, most tablets and mini PCs that come with the processor run at clock speeds up to 1.6 GHz. But the folks at ArcTablet created custom firmware that lets you run at speeds up to 1.92 GHz.

RK3188 overclocked

The results are pretty noticeable, with about a 25 percent higher score int he Antutu benchmark, and a nearly 40 percent boost in Linpack.

Of course, overclocking can cause increased heat generation, shorter battery life, and stability problems in some situations. While you don’t have to worry about battery life if you’re using an Android mini PC, there’s still a chance the chip could overheat — ArcTablet pointed a fan at their UG007 Android TV stick to help keep it cool during the tests.

You don’t need to overclock the RK3188 chip to run any individual apps — there  isn’t an aren’t many Android games or utilities that I’m aware of that won’t run well on the chip at 1.6 GHz. But if you’re hoping to speed up web page load times, improve the overall responsiveness of a system, or just see if you can melt your CPU, it’s nice to know you can push the chip’s limits.

Or you could look for a device with a faster chip like a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 or Samsung Exynos 5 processor. But odds are you’ll have to pay much more to get a device with one of those chips.

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8 replies on “Rockchip RK3188 chip overclocked to run at 1.92 GHz”

  1. It’s funny, because the RK3188 PC Sticks are almost always (wrongly) advertised as having a RK3188 running at 1.8ghz, even though they are always set to 1.6ghz.

    The initial antutu benchmarks were also in line with the 1.8ghz clock speed. I’m pretty certain now that they have been underclocked to 1.6ghz probably to due to heating issues.

  2. Has this been attempted running a display at 720p or even 1080p, a screencast capture utility, and then some simple things like web browsing or text editing or whatever?

    The main thing I’ve found a performance hunger for is doing such captures when the screen is larger than typical phone sizes. I’d be interested in the results (frame rate?) both with and without such overclocking on RK3188 systems. I can’t pretend to know where the bottlenecks are but I assume encoding overhead is a big one.

  3. Jeff,

    The main purpose of this test was to check if the device could be overclocked. I haven’t yet measured temperature nor assessed stability in detail, all I can say is I could run the benchmark several times without having the device freezing or rebooting. Without the fan, the system wasn’t stable at all and couldn’t complete a single benchmark.

    Again, I am not saying in any way this is a setup I recommend, because I don’t have enough history on this configuration. My original article is here: https://www.arctablet.com/blog/featured/rockchip-rk3188-cpu-overclock-to-1-8ghz-up-1-92-ghz-ugoos-ug007b-minipc/

    Cheers.

  4. Does this person run stability tests while checking the temperature and the occurrence of throttling? Do these benchmarks actually check for errors in their calculations? He used a fan but didn’t mention anything about actual temperatures. Maybe he talks about it in the video but I can’t watch it right now.

    I’ve seen many people overclock their phones and other ARM basd devices but I haven’t really seen anyone thoroughly check for stability and throttling. Just a quick and subjective, “seems fine, must be stable” kind of test.

    1. Get “RR3 Graphics” from Play store. The game improperly profiles the game. This will let set to medium detail.

    2. GPU should be overclocked in stock version of RK3188. They say 533MHz but they say 1.8GHz but real is 1.6GHz so…

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