Rooting The Droid FACT or FICTION ?

[micp1480]

Let me start this discussion in hopes of getting enough feed back to help others who are thinking about Rooting their Droid. Does rooting the Droid and adding ROMS and Kernels really make the Droid perform any faster? Wouldn't you say to make the Droid perform like the newer Droids; as what most of us are seeking to do, you really need to change the components on the circuit board, such as the processor, to make this really happen. I know that their have been bench marks indicating faster speeds, but I haven't seen my browser or the market place open any faster, and there are other programs. I believe the the Original Droid compared to the Droid X, would be like comparing a single processor with a Dual core processor, and no ROM or Kernel is going to help. Your feedback is appreciated. Thank you.


Micp1480

 

[Dave12308]

Rooting the Droid, and doing things such as changing the ROM and kernel do not generally in and of themselves do a whole lot for overall performance, except that some custom ROMs may not have as many processes running in the background by default due to stripped out apps.

It is when you introduce an overclocking kernel that the speed increases. The Droid 1 uses an OMAP3430 chipset, the Droid 2/X use the OMAP3630. The main difference between these chipsets are the 3630 is a 45nm part, the 3430 is 65nm. The die shrink of the 3630 allows it to be clocked higher while (theoretically) attaining similar battery life to the 3430. The 3630 also has a faster graphics core, courteousy of the die shrink. So a Droid 1's processor, when overclocked to 1GHz is very similar to the Droid 2/X's (although no one has figured out how to overclock the graphics core to match the 3630) - the difference between the processors is nowheres near the difference between a single core and a dual core.

And it's the system intensive apps, such as games/rendering Flash content/etc. that is going to show the greatest improvement when overclocked. You probably won't notice too much in general use other than faster load times and smoother transitions.

 

[micp1480]

Dave12308, thank you for your feed back, it was very informative. I didn't think about the graphics end of it, and that would be something that all these ROM developers may want to start working on, if all possible.



MICP1480

 

[iamasongnow]

i'm going to take a guess and say that the time it takes something like the browser or market to open is probably more tied in with the strength of your data signal, not the speed of your phone. or this could be totally bogus.

 

[micp1480]

Iamasongnow, point well made. I do believe that this has a lot of validity to it, but when I was standing next to my friend who has the droid X, I asked him to click on the Market at the same time as me, and his was instantaneous.


Micp 1480

 

[takeshi]

you really need to change the components on the circuit board, such as the processor, to make this really happen

Not necessarily. Try Googling "overclocking" or searching here if you're not familiar with it.