Motorola Milestone Overclocking and rooting

[Szadzik]

Ok thanks a lot I am planning on running it at 800 mhz Do you think this will decrease the the life of the phone by a lot what about 1 ghz

I have not tested the battery life so I would not be able to say.

I would say that if you use SetCPU and set up profiles the right way you will not see any difference. There is not much performance improvement on 1GHz against 800MHz though unless you play games.

Temperatures on the other hand are noticeably lower on 800MHz compared to 1GHz.

 

[joa]

I'm not sure if at stock speed the milestone is a constant 550mhz (even in standby) or if it's incremental, I assume the former. I have a kernel locked milestone and am using milestone-overclock set to 800Mhz (phone is a lot more responsive), I'm using 1 profile in setCPU with a minimum of 125Mhz-800Mhz.

I honestly haven't noticed any change in battery life.

hope that helps,

joa

edit: something i have noticed is when overclocked with the above it's fine throughout the OS and app, when playing games i get the occasional restart. There could be several reasons for this and i'm not going to blame the clock speed just yet. I have been messing around with the bootloader. will report any findings though.

 

[RacecarBMW]

I'm not sure if at stock speed the milestone is a constant 550mhz (even in standby) or if it's incremental, I assume the former. I have a kernel locked milestone and am using milestone-overclock set to 800Mhz (phone is a lot more responsive), I'm using 1 profile in setCPU with a minimum of 125Mhz-800Mhz.

I honestly haven't noticed any change in battery life.

hope that helps,

joa

edit: something i have noticed is when overclocked with the above it's fine throughout the OS and app, when playing games i get the occasional restart. There could be several reasons for this and i'm not going to blame the clock speed just yet. I have been messing around with the bootloader. will report any findings though.

Do you have a case

do you think putting a case on will affect the heat or life of the phone

 

[Szadzik]

Do you have a case

do you think putting a case on will affect the heat or life of the phone

What kind of case do you mean? One that will only serve while the phone is not used and the phone needs to be take out of it to be used or one that you will keep the phone in all the time?

If you put the phone into a case for it to be idle than it will not get hot because it will not be doing anything requiring CPU power.

If you put the phone into something and keep it in it all the time and also while working with the phone than you may run into problems - will you run into heating issues? Try for ourself - it is not going to explode, it will just show that the temps are higher, you will stop using it and it will cool down. You will know for sure when you try.

 

[RacecarBMW]

Do you have a case

do you think putting a case on will affect the heat or life of the phone

What kind of case do you mean? One that will only serve while the phone is not used and the phone needs to be take out of it to be used or one that you will keep the phone in all the time?

If you put the phone into a case for it to be idle than it will not get hot because it will not be doing anything requiring CPU power.

If you put the phone into something and keep it in it all the time and also while working with the phone than you may run into problems - will you run into heating issues? Try for ourself - it is not going to explode, it will just show that the temps are higher, you will stop using it and it will cool down. You will know for sure when you try.

is there some sort of app that can tell me the temperature on my droid and not the battery temprature

 

[Szadzik]

is there some sort of app that can tell me the temperature on my droid and not the battery temprature

No, I do not think so.

 

[RacecarBMW]

is there some sort of app that can tell me the temperature on my droid and not the battery temprature

No, I do not think so.

ok thanks
I can't wait to try this

 

[Croak]

You don't need SetCPU, and after a couple weeks of experimenting, I'd say you don't WANT SetCPU.

The Milestone/Droid will still clock up and down dynamically to save power without SetCPU running. It also clocks up and down in much smaller increments when needed, where SetCPU only has 4 speeds, 125/250/500/Max.

SetCPU can cause some system slowdowns and stability issues that go away when not running it. I'm not knocking the program, but for a Milestone/Droid, it's just not needed.

The only real use for SetCPU is to let you downclock if it gets too hot, or to lock the speed at maximum (really only handy for benchmarks).

You can easily verify that the Milestone/Droid is dynamically adjusting power by installing SystemPanel Lite. It'll show you a dynamic CPU speed value (as well as battery temp and internal temp sensor), etc. Nice little free app.

Also, experiment with voltages. I'm able to run my Milestone at 850mhz with a VSEL of 50 (which is lower than the stock VSEL of 56). Without needing SetCPU, my system runs cooler and gets better battery life than default, but bursts up to max speed when needed. Since it runs cooler (never seen higher than 38c), there's no need for SetCPU for a temperature throttle.

850mhz was the sweet spot for me, a hair faster than a Nexus/Desire/Incredible/EVO running a Snapdragon and Android 2.1.

At 1000mhz, it's much faster than a Snapdragon in benchmarks, but you really only notice it in benchmarks, day to day operation of the phone you have to work hard to feel the difference between 1000 and 850mhz.

 

[Tanknspank]

But can you set up profiles that will lower the clock speed when it gets too hot? Or lower the clock speed when your battery hits a certain point? Setcpu is very handy. You can get it free over at xda-developers.com, but I can't link it on my phone. The market is his way of getting donations for his work. Also, I can't remember the apps name, maybe it was tempmonitor..., but it was made for droid kernels that had the built in feature, so I doubt it will work for the milestone.

 

[Croak]

Lowering the clock speed is a placebo, the Milestone ALREADY lowers the speed when sleeping by about as much as SetCPU would do, though it never drops down to 125, so that the phone will wake up fast enough to allow you to answer a call.

As for temps, as I said, if you adjust your voltage properly, there is never any worry about overheating, it simply won't. If you're balls-to-the-walls overclocking and have a voltage-hungry processor in your particular Milestone, then it's a slightly different story.

I think SetCPU was/is needed on custom overclocked Droid ROMs, because the way those ROMs are hacked for overclocking pretty much nukes the native speed management. But this kernel replacement .apk leaves the stock speed management intact, and SetCPU is then trying to override that.

Also take a look at how much battery % SetCPU consumes in a day. Any savings you get with more aggressive power management than native could easily be offset by how much juice SetCPU needs just to run.

Just try it for a couple days without SetCPU. I think you'll find that there are fewer "hitches" and slowdowns throughout the day (caused by SetCPU settings conflicting with native and polling overhead). And if you've dialed your voltage back as far as possible, you'll end up with the same or better battery life.

 

[Tanknspank]

Setcpu just changes what the os does to the speed management, and sleeps until one of the profiles are tripped. Check out overclocking 101 in the hacking FAQ section. I still think its still better to have setcpu than it is to not.

 

[RacecarBMW]

Wow the information keeps coming Ill try around different combinations of what you guys said and thanks Tanknspank I will take a look there

 

[chad_petree]

when we install froyo will we lose the overclock? , since the root will be lost im asuming we will lose the overclock =/

 

[Tanknspank]

when we install froyo will we lose the overclock? , since the root will be lost im asuming we will lose the overclock =/

Yeah, you will.

 

[chad_petree]

You don't need SetCPU, and after a couple weeks of experimenting, I'd say you don't WANT SetCPU.

The Milestone/Droid will still clock up and down dynamically to save power without SetCPU running. It also clocks up and down in much smaller increments when needed, where SetCPU only has 4 speeds, 125/250/500/Max.

SetCPU can cause some system slowdowns and stability issues that go away when not running it. I'm not knocking the program, but for a Milestone/Droid, it's just not needed.

The only real use for SetCPU is to let you downclock if it gets too hot, or to lock the speed at maximum (really only handy for benchmarks).

You can easily verify that the Milestone/Droid is dynamically adjusting power by installing SystemPanel Lite. It'll show you a dynamic CPU speed value (as well as battery temp and internal temp sensor), etc. Nice little free app.

Also, experiment with voltages. I'm able to run my Milestone at 850mhz with a VSEL of 50 (which is lower than the stock VSEL of 56). Without needing SetCPU, my system runs cooler and gets better battery life than default, but bursts up to max speed when needed. Since it runs cooler (never seen higher than 38c), there's no need for SetCPU for a temperature throttle.

850mhz was the sweet spot for me, a hair faster than a Nexus/Desire/Incredible/EVO running a Snapdragon and Android 2.1.

At 1000mhz, it's much faster than a Snapdragon in benchmarks, but you really only notice it in benchmarks, day to day operation of the phone you have to work hard to feel the difference between 1000 and 850mhz.

What values did you use in khz to get 850 mhz? i type 850000 but nothing happens =/