True Overclock is now possible on PSP!

When you thought that people couldn’t squeeze any more out of their PSPs, talented scene developer m-cid has released an Open Source solution for Overclocking the PSP’s CPU. Which is now integrated into ARK-5!

I never would have imagined to see the day where a PSP CFW allows to set the PSP’s clock at a higher value than 333MHz, but here we are and the results are incredible to say the least. Heavy and demanding games like GTA and Metal Gear can now run at a stable 30FPS when they were many times locked at 20, or barely able to reach 30. Of course being able to unlock more FPS in some of these games requires proper patches, GTA games have the new and acclaimed CheatDeviceRemastered by Freakler, but for other games I’ve found that cwcheat and similar plugins also usually provide FPS patches for many games.

The only downside is that this is not a one-size-fits-all solution, the clock speeds that your device can handle might differ from others. From the many testing we’ve done, it seems that 433 is the most universally accepted clock speed that still maintains stability, with some 1K and 2K consoles prefering lower frequencies such as 418 or even 383 in one case. Luckily for 3K and Go users, these consoles have shown to accept high frequencies, 433 and even 463, with the case of my own PSP Go accepting both of these and being stable while totally rejecting 418, so just because your console doesn’t like one frequency doesn’t mean it might not like higher, always try to test all of them.

Sadly for PSP Street owners Overclock doesn’t work and actually has the opposite effect and makes the system go way too slow, slower than the minimum ARK allows in its UI (133), it is for the time being unknown if this can be fixed or if it’s not even possible to overclock a Street. Vita users are also out of luck, as overclocking has no effect and the effective clock speed of ePSP will always cap at 333MHz.

Notes:

• While the plugin allows up to 555MHz, it is more than probable that these frequencies are unachievable by any PSP, the highest I’ve seen is my Go at 483. For safety, ARK-5 will not allow you to reach beyond that frequency.
• There was a previous developer claiming to have achieved overclock on the PSP up to 366MHz and videos showcasing it. While this plugin may have been real, it was never made open source and the code for this new overclock plugin is completely different and written from scratch, as well as battle tested by various users and many different PSPs.
• You can find the original source code of the plugin and stress tester here: https://github.com/mcidclan/psp-555mhz-plugin.
• You can find a beta pre-release of ARK-5 if you dig around, it’s not that hard.