Zero-WH shipped running at 700MHz?

Support
1

Hi Folks.

Can anyone confirm of the current batch of Zero-WH are being shipped running at 700MHz, instead of the quoted 1GHz? The Standard Zero v1.3 are indeed running at 1GHz, but when I use the same benchmark software on the WH, it’s coming in at an equivalent of around 700MHz in comparison.

Anyone else found this? Is there perhaps one batch going out that’s not been overclocked as per the website?

Thanks, Mark.

2

Sorry for the delayed response. Did you get any feedback about this from other channels?

I suspect you could have a Pi Zero which hasn’t had the one-time-programming flash executed correctly. This happens from time to time and prevents the firmware from detecting which Pi version it’s running on, thus failing to apply the overclock. I believe the only fix is a replacement.

3

Hi. Thanks. The issue seems to be that all the Zero-W default to 700Mhz, unless specifically told in the config file to run at 1000. The application we’re using is a bare bones system that boots the firmware blob, then runs some custom code to act as a second processor in a vintage computer system, so it’s not using a regular Linux (etc) boot.

If we use the earlier firmware blob that we use with the Zero V1.3, and try and set the Zero-W to 1000Mhz, it won’t boot at all, we need to use the later blob, however this takes longer to initialise, causing issues in our application.

I think it’s something we’ll have to deal with in our software, it doesn’t appear to be bug as such, just that the Ws seem to need to be told to run at 1000, whereas the V1.3s do it automatically.

Thanks, Mark.

4

Oooh, glad it’s not a hardware issue! There’s a lot of these vintage computer coprocessor projects happening, really cool stuff!

I’ve heard tell of a project that uses the Pi to sniff the address/data lines on an expansion port, and build up a copy of the internal system state from which it can generate a beautifully clean, upscaled HDMI output.