OverClocking 101

[samsonite801]

No dilution intended.. LAST COMMENT (I swear) .. The toggle in data/local.prop being......... ro.HOME_APP_ADJ=1 correct?

Yes, it should be: ro.HOME_APP_ADJ=1

 

[projekt128]

If you are getting a warm CPU while on a ULV Kernel, there may be something wrong. Please try a Low Voltage Kernel and see if Pandora still exhibits this behavior. I want to rule out a Voltage issue before addressing a speed issue.

1.25 ulv Pandora is running consistently from at 30-34ºC I guess my sense of touch was off. But something silly like Robo Defense game seems to run a bit hotter.. Could be just me though. Seems like a game would be the most demanding task.

Actually that isn't always true. If you are in a weak 3G area while running Pandora and it is struggling to buffer the song, it is eating a lot of battery and CPU time trying to make sure the song is playing back in "good quality".

Currently games on the Android OS suffer from bad programming practices. They assume, and I have to admit rather correctly, that the phone is stock and can handle being run at 100%. They do this to get the max FPS (Frames Per Second) out of the display. This helps with collision detection and a few other items like AI (Artificial Intelligence) and user input. The problem is when we overclock, instead of the game loop running 20 to 30 times per second, we now are running it 40 to 90 times a second. That amount of screen drawing and CPU usage is going to heat the phone up very quickly. One day Android games will be written with FPS locks (IE the display only needs to be update 25 times a second) and the phone can be idle waiting for the next loop to execute. This would help tremendously with battery and heat issues. But I don't see that happening any time soon.

Makes perfect sense. There should be fixed fps settings as there are in PC games. Since we are overclocked, do you have any suggestions for best rom/kernel and setcpu profile settings for best managing these demanding tasks. I don't worry so much about the games as I do with Pandora, as I use that most everyday in car.

 

[huskerkate]

hey, that script/toggle in your sig is outstanding - thanks!!!! made a huge difference in the lag problems i was experiencing!

quick question - is that something that needs to be reentered after a soft reboot??
sorry for the noob question - but thanks again!!

When the command is entered in terminal, nothing happens except a new command line. Is this what should happen or did I make a mistake?

You should be able to browse to /data/local.prop and see the new toggle command in there if it took.

Let's talk about this over in the launcherpro.com forum because I already have a topic running over there. Full instructions on doing this mod are there. I just don't want to further dillute this thread with posts that shouldn't be here.

Now back to overclocking... I took out the Slayher kernel I had been running with the interactive CPU governor and put back on my old jdlfg kernel which is built for Lithium Mod ROM and set it back to 'On Demand' in SetCPU and I already notice that while power-using, the battery is already lasting longer, and it acts a lot snappier again (menus scroll smoother like before). For some reason I had thought it may have been faster with the interactive one but after moving back to this old kernel it had become apparent to me without a shadow of a doubt that the jdlfg kernel which is built lighter with less modules runs faster and smoother.
.
.

 

[samsonite801]

hey, that script/toggle in your sig is outstanding - thanks!!!! made a huge difference in the lag problems i was experiencing!

quick question - is that something that needs to be reentered after a soft reboot??
sorry for the noob question - but thanks again!!

NOPE. The setting DOES persist after reboot. The initial echo command entered in creates a file called local.prop (if it doesn't already exist - in which case it would just append to the local.prop file) which the toggle stays in there and each time you reboot, the system will parse that line out and load that setting in.
.
.

 

[xmguy]

I have my Droid overclocked with one Chevy's 1.0 Ghz kernels (see signature)

I have loads of battery and cpu/battery temp lockouts.

low # is MIN high # is MAX (i.e. 250Mhz is my MIN, 800Mhz is my MAX)

Battery at 40% drops to 250Mhz to 800Mhz
Battery at 30% drops to 250MHz to 700Mhz
Battery at 20% drops to 250Mhz to 550Mhz
Battery at 11% drops to 250Mhz to 400Mhz
Battery at 5% drops to 250Mhz to 250Mhz

Screen off is 250Mhz to 400Mhz

Charging on AC or Full is 250Mhz to 400Mhz

CPU Overhead lockout at 250Mhz to 800Mhz at 125F

Battery Overheat lockout at 250Mhz to 800Mhz at 110F

NORMAL runs at 250Mhz to 1.0Ghz

 

[blazednova]

Last night I fell asleep with my phone chargeing and playing pandora. When I woke up my droid had fallen between the coutch arm and the cusion. When I followed the usb cable to find my droid. I noticed everything within about a foot of my phone was crazy hot. I picked up the phone and checked set cpu my phone was 167 degrees I could hardly pick the danm thing up it was so hot. I took the battey off and put it over a AC vent for about 20 minuets then charged it back up. I'm pretty sure it was at that heat for a couple of hours. Now my phone is super Lagy. And the full battery lasted 3 hours on barely any use. Can I fix this or am I gonna have to replace it?

 

[XxSinisteRxX]

Last night I fell asleep with my phone chargeing and playing pandora. When I woke up my droid had fallen between the coutch arm and the cusion. When I followed the usb cable to find my droid. I noticed everything within about a foot of my phone was crazy hot. I picked up the phone and checked set cpu my phone was 167 degrees I could hardly pick the danm thing up it was so hot. I took the battey off and put it over a AC vent for about 20 minuets then charged it back up. I'm pretty sure it was at that heat for a couple of hours. Now my phone is super Lagy. And the full battery lasted 3 hours on barely any use. Can I fix this or am I gonna have to replace it?

Ur gonna have to purchase a new battery bud. It most likely fried alot of the cells in your battery. Heat is a battery's worst enemy. And bad for other hardware as well.

 

[blazednova]

Last night I fell asleep with my phone chargeing and playing pandora. When I woke up my droid had fallen between the coutch arm and the cusion. When I followed the usb cable to find my droid. I noticed everything within about a foot of my phone was crazy hot. I picked up the phone and checked set cpu my phone was 167 degrees I could hardly pick the danm thing up it was so hot. I took the battey off and put it over a AC vent for about 20 minuets then charged it back up. I'm pretty sure it was at that heat for a couple of hours. Now my phone is super Lagy. And the full battery lasted 3 hours on barely any use. Can I fix this or am I gonna have to replace it?

Ur gonna have to purchase a new battery bud. It most likely fried alot of the cells in your battery. Heat is a battery's worst enemy. And bad for other hardware as well.

Thanks. I just did a factory reset and plugged it in to charge. There is aleast a one second lag on the keyboard. And the web browsing is soo touchy. Nothing is normal on it. I think I'm gonna have to get a new phone altogether. :'(

 

[SGTiger]

Skull One,

Sorry if this has already been answered, but hard to go through 18 pages. Any idea why Google Maps Navigator gets the Droid so hot so fast when overclocked. I always have to lower my speed when running navigation or just wait until my temp profile kicks in. Is it just because the app is cpu intensive?

 

[XxSinisteRxX]

Skull One,

Sorry if this has already been answered, but hard to go through 18 pages. Any idea why Google Maps Navigator gets the Droid so hot so fast when overclocked. I always have to lower my speed when running navigation or just wait until my temp profile kicks in. Is it just because the app is cpu intensive?

Google Maps Navigator requires the cpu to constantly process data for the realtime graphics and the gps refresh rate, that's the main reason it sucks down your battery and creates so much heat in your processor. Whenever you run the Navigator app i would set your profile to the stock speed or fairly close to it. Don't want your battery getting to hot and frying the cells in it. These batteries are the most expensive out of any phone i've owned.

 

[JohnnyDepth]

Last night I fell asleep with my phone chargeing and playing pandora. When I woke up my droid had fallen between the coutch arm and the cusion. When I followed the usb cable to find my droid. I noticed everything within about a foot of my phone was crazy hot. I picked up the phone and checked set cpu my phone was 167 degrees I could hardly pick the danm thing up it was so hot. I took the battey off and put it over a AC vent for about 20 minuets then charged it back up. I'm pretty sure it was at that heat for a couple of hours. Now my phone is super Lagy. And the full battery lasted 3 hours on barely any use. Can I fix this or am I gonna have to replace it?

Your screen name is ironic now, damn.

Did you have setCPU profiles running?
If not in the future you should have those...they
really do help out managing an overclocked phones desire to heat up.

 

[Skull One]

Last night I fell asleep with my phone chargeing and playing pandora. When I woke up my droid had fallen between the coutch arm and the cusion. When I followed the usb cable to find my droid. I noticed everything within about a foot of my phone was crazy hot. I picked up the phone and checked set cpu my phone was 167 degrees I could hardly pick the danm thing up it was so hot. I took the battey off and put it over a AC vent for about 20 minuets then charged it back up. I'm pretty sure it was at that heat for a couple of hours. Now my phone is super Lagy. And the full battery lasted 3 hours on barely any use. Can I fix this or am I gonna have to replace it?

Ur gonna have to purchase a new battery bud. It most likely fried alot of the cells in your battery. Heat is a battery's worst enemy. And bad for other hardware as well.

Thanks. I just did a factory reset and plugged it in to charge. There is aleast a one second lag on the keyboard. And the web browsing is soo touchy. Nothing is normal on it. I think I'm gonna have to get a new phone altogether. :'(

I am actually shocked your battery even works. Since Lithium-Ion batteries can reach thermal runaway at temps as low as 140F. I am also very concerned that the phone didn't auto reboot at that temp. I will have to investigate how/why that didn't happen.

 

[samsonite801]

You should also consider setting up some proactive battery cooling schemes see my prior postings here and I explain my fail safe scheme to keeping my phone completely cool no matter how hard I drive it. It works! Really, my phone never gets higher than 107°F ever.

 

[drpaul07]

This is why I made a bunch of preventative profiles in SetCPU for this reason. So if the temp is below 100°f then it gets the full 1000mHz but if it goes higher than a mere 100°f, it will slow down to 850mHz, and if it hits 104°f then it slows to 700mHz, and if it hits 108°f then it slows to 600mHz, and if it hits 111°f then it slows to 400mHz, and finally, if it hits 122°f then it slows to 250mHz. This is my safety mechanism I must use since I notice a lot of apps do this very thing of heating the phone up to the point of meltdown if I don't stop it. But with these settings, it never goes past 108°f at all anymore.


.

Samsonite,

so all these profiles that you have set are monitoring your cpu temp right? not the battery temp?

 

[samsonite801]

I tried both before, but finally figured out that since the battery and the CPU are so close to each other in a little tiny space anyway, that it doesn't even matter to have or use both forms of monitoring. The few times I tried CPU monitoring anyway, sometimes I would get SetCPU crashes, although rare, I decided to just use battery temp profiles since it would never crash SetCPU. The crashes were likely caused by some wierd thing in the kernel I was running but nevertheless, I find it doesn't really matter because if your phone's battery is running at 108°F say, your CPU is not going to be far from that.

Also note that kernel plays a big role in temp overall. I found that Chevy kernels tend to run kinda hot for me, and P3droid kernels tend to run a bit cooler, but most recently discovered my coolest operation when using a jdlfg kernel. Now I did briefly try a Slayher kernel that seemed a bit cooler (running on interactive governer) it would actually get hotter when you loaded it down a bunch. So as of now, I rate jdlfg the best performing kernel that runs coolest, and it was optimized for the Lithium Mod ROM, which I run.