[O/C]Overclock Your Android Phone

Overclock Your Android Phone
by splat

Overclocking unlocks the true potential of your hardware, so why should it be limited to desktop computers? A cellphone is a tiny computer after all, so surely there must be a way to overclock that too. Thanks to SetCPU, Google Android based phones do have that ability.

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Don't have any smartphone of my own, but quite interesting.

Whats the impact on battery, though?

Impact on battery life is variable depending on settings and usage.
Having run some of the early oc kernels (prior to setcpu) my experience is that battery life is NOT impacted negatively at speeds up to 800mhz.
In fact, my battery life was actually INcreased, although reports varied. (Just as it is with desktop chips- results vary per chip.) At 1.2 Ghz, the battery will drain pretty quick....

I run fairly agressive settings to modulate cpu speed so I get good response from my phone but also allow it to idle down to 250 mhz or up to a max of 1200. With these settings my battery life is about the same as it was stock, at 550mhz.

The biggest drains are wifi and gps regardless of overclocking- if those are not used and no heavy phone use occurs (my normal calls are less than 5 minutes 3 or 4 times a day) then I can go a couple of days between charges.

One other suggestion I would add: TempMonitor.
This lets you read the cpu core temp instead of just the battery which is all the stock temp indicates. As in any overclocked computer, knowing the temp range your cpu normally runs in is important to max performance and maintain long life.

Oh this is sweet thanks. Looking at hopefully getting an Android phone when the HTC Desire releases for US Cellular this Summer. Ideally its what I'd love to get and having the ability to OC or tweak it a little will be welcome.

Yay

I was going to do this but my MotoDroid already runs hot enough and the battery is too short as it is.

FudgeNuggets said:

I was going to do this but my MotoDroid already runs hot enough and the battery is too short as it is.

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Could lower the clock speed in non-time of need might help extend the battery life.

hmm sounds interesting. Just got a nexus one and I love it !

What sort of speeds are you looking at for absolute max ?

not sure about the nexus one, it varies depending on the phone. i believe the max on the droid eris is 1100mhz, which is double the stock speed iirc.

a phone with a tiny processor doing clock speeds a desktop used to do about 10 years ago ... woot

splat said:

not sure about the nexus one, it varies depending on the phone. i believe the max on the droid eris is 1100mhz, which is double the stock speed iirc.

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I believe the Nexus comes at 1000mhz to start with.

Would you also be able to undervolt it to increase the battery life? I don't really have much experience with smartphones, but it would seem that this could be more important to certain users than performance.

As a side question, what applications would you run on a phone that requires an overclock to improve performance?

Cbeppe

Yes, I have my phone underclocked by a couple hundred mhz, but I haven't done anything with voltage. Droid incredible running at 691mhz Max, 250 min.

Runs everything i use smooth. I run plex, nzbair, default browser, Pandora, Google play music, logmein, and xbmc remote mainly. Nothing real CPU intensive - mostly just internet and managing my htpc/streaming.

I get pretty good battery life, but I have also disabled all fancy effects and stuff. Display is always using the most battery... not much that can be done about that, but I keep my screen timeout on the next to lowest setting.

Yeah 30 sec time out vs the 1min they have it set by default on all phones really sucks the life out of it.

I force it to run slow when the screen is off. At least with my old phone I'd drop the clocks by 20% when it hits 50% battery life... just to help conserve power a little more. Though charging I cranked it up to OC speeds for my rom I was using on my old phone.

Have yet to do anything with my new one yet, but im sure that will change in due time.