Overclocking And Overvolting

[tsh]

IMO, the most sensible approach would be to ask OPT to up the vsel setting from 48 to 50, which is still OPP3 and include it in the official kernel. That way most if not all should reach 900MHz, which delivers the best performance at the lowest voltage, without problems and without causing damage in the long run.

I have to admit to not looking at the spec sheet - but is this setting making any assumptions about the tolerances or any external components, or is it entirely contained within the OMAP? Don't forget your phone is designed for a 2 year lifetime before replacement (and some of the RF will be included in this too, xtals drifting slowly over time can be calibrated back using the network as a reference - but only within a certain limit)

 

[mali]

I have no clue how stable these voltage settings are supposed to be and if they are affected by external components. What I know is that I'm effectively undervolting, cause stock voltage is vsel=56 at 550MHz. I suppose OPT use the nominal OPP3 setting, which is vsel=48. At this setting Pandora's maximum stable overclock hovers around 850MHz and additional 25mV would most likely allow 900MHz for most if not all users. Higher speed settings are certainly possible even within (voltage-)specs, but you definitely notice the curve getting steeper as you leave the sensibility window the 3430/3530 operate in.

 

[Renegade]

I also overclocked my Motorola Milestone.

Overclocked at 1,2Ghz 74 vsel and I use it mainly to play emulators like gbc ,gba, nes, snes, genesis, spectrum, c64, amiga and PSX and they all run pretty smooth! (Using the GameGripper to play the games works pretty well until I receive my Pandora)

It never crashed on me and I am using it overclocked at 1,2Ghz for almost 3 months now

 

[mali]

Don't melt your phone
I can see a modded Pandora with heatspreader running at that speed for a while, but without additional precaution running at 1.2GHz/74 is nuts, imo

 

[Renegade]

Me and 3 friends have the same setup all are running at 1,2Ghz/74 and none have any problems so far

The CPU is very capable of running at that speed, else it would become unstable. Also batterlife is not affected that much it seems. It gets a bit hot when playing for a longer period but it also gets hot at 550Mhz.

PSX4Droid is pretty awesome, playing a lot of Crash Bandicoot on my phone lately.

 

[mali]

The heat generation at 550MHz should be considerably less if you adjust the voltage accordingly. Also keep in mind that both heat exposure and taking a higher current from the battery will let it degrade much faster.

 

[Renegade]

Anyway as long as it runs my emulators smoothly I can live with a little heat and battery drain. The phone gets charged every night in its cradle anyway.

Froyo does run everything even smoother than before, espcially emulators

 

[mali]

^ That's cool, so you notice a difference in speed when running the PSX emu on Froyo? Which version are you using? I'm still on 2.1, but I might try the JIT hack. I'll wait for the official 2.2 to be released for EU Droid.
The only problem I have with the PSX emu is the bad sound quality, aside from that having Diablo in my pocket is just awesome

 

[Renegade]

I am using MotoFrenzy V0.4, and for me yes Froyo is faster than 2.1update1 (2.1u1 has the 2D 30fps problem and Froyo not). I dont have any sound problems on the games I tried so far. If you can give me an example game I will try it to see it it works correctly for me or not.

 

[mali]

So far I only tried Diablo, as I'm not a big console player anyway. Below 1GHz the sound is crackly and even at 1.2GHz the background music doesn't play continuously and stutters from time to time. The game itself feels full speed, though.

edit:
Btw, I did some further testing and found out that 1.15GHz is stable at vsel=66. 66 is the highest value that's still inside specs, if you include OPP6.

 

[urjaman]

The output accuracy of the TPS65950 VDD1 SMPS is +-4%. The OPPx voltage range is specified as some voltage +-5%. Count from there if you can take it even a notch higher than centered and still be in-spec(/me not going to waste the time doing the math).

Also, VSEL 74?!? ... the SMPS is not supposed to be able to go higher than 1.45V which is VSEL 68. Maybe it does then (with unknown accuracy and limit), but I'd be really really scared in going above VSEL 80, that would be 1.6V which would be the absolute maximum voltage specified for VDD1 (eg. the value over which the chip can blow up if it wants to go )
You all know U = 0.6V + (VSEL*0.0125V).

 

[mali]

I did some further OMAP3430 overlocking tests. Actually the graphical glitches I experienced in the PSX emu were incompatibilities. IIRC, Diablo was listed as "works" on these boards, did someone actually walk into the "hidden passage"? The game starts to produce garbled graphics in there and the code should be the same on Android and Pandora as it's from Zod.

My device crashes at 900/48 so it's pretty much the same as most OMAP3530 I read about on these boards.
My stable speed/vsel settings so far:

800/46
900/50
1000/56
1100/62

 

[b1ueskycomp1ex]

I did some further OMAP3430 overlocking tests. Actually the graphical glitches I experienced in the PSX emu were incompatibilities. IIRC, Diablo was listed as "works" on these boards, did someone actually walk into the "hidden passage"? The game starts to produce garbled graphics in there and the code should be the same on Android and Pandora as it's from Zod.

My device crashes at 900/48 so it's pretty much the same as most OMAP3530 I read about on these boards.
My stable speed/vsel settings so far:

800/46
900/50
1000/56
1100/62

It would be interesting if we could get some people to test out overclocking on the pandora. It would be interesting to see where this could go and how high the safer values would be. 1GHz would definitely be an amazing achievement, especially with all the pandora can already do at lower clock speeds. I'm really excited about this. Everything with a processor that I own is overclocked (athlon II 2.9Ghz OC - 3.8Ghz, 9800GT EE 550 - 650Mhz core, etc.) so it would definitely be interesting to see where the pandora's limits are.

 

[jdbye]

I did some further OMAP3430 overlocking tests. Actually the graphical glitches I experienced in the PSX emu were incompatibilities. IIRC, Diablo was listed as "works" on these boards, did someone actually walk into the "hidden passage"? The game starts to produce garbled graphics in there and the code should be the same on Android and Pandora as it's from Zod.

My device crashes at 900/48 so it's pretty much the same as most OMAP3530 I read about on these boards.
My stable speed/vsel settings so far:

800/46
900/50
1000/56
1100/62

It would be interesting if we could get some people to test out overclocking on the pandora. It would be interesting to see where this could go and how high the safer values would be. 1GHz would definitely be an amazing achievement, especially with all the pandora can already do at lower clock speeds. I'm really excited about this. Everything with a processor that I own is overclocked (athlon II 2.9Ghz OC - 3.8Ghz, 9800GT EE 550 - 650Mhz core, etc.) so it would definitely be interesting to see where the pandora's limits are.

I'll give it a try with mali's vsel settings once I get the kernel compiled.
Edit: urjaman and Vitel do have it stable at 1ghz at OPP5/vsel 60 already though, but my goal is to overclock with as little risk to the CPU as possible - so I have to compile my own kernel with mali's vsel settings

 

[DynaMight]

I'm sure not all Pandoras will be equal, once theres more of them in the wild, we need a program that allows us to change the vsel ourselves then more people can try different voltages. If the crappiest clocking Pandora can do say 1Ghz @ 56vsel then it will probably be safe to hard code that into a kernel. It'll be interesting to see if the Pandora Mhz vs vsel is equal to the Milestone.

 

[kuru]

Isn't this semi-moot because of all the testing that has been done on n900s? It's the same hardware, isn't it?
OK that's assumptions :/

99.9% should be stable at 700Mhz
90%   should be stable at 800Mhz
75%   should be stable at 900Mhz
30%   should be stable at 1.0Ghz
10%   should be stable at 1.1Ghz
5%    should be stable at 1.15Ghz

See http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=595582&postcount=774

Edit: http://wiki.maemo.org/Overclocking ist also interesting
And another edit: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=596274&postcount=937 for a quote on TI lifetime expectancies

 

[Blue Ion]

This thread at maemo should provide a much more clearer insight about the overclocking capabilities of the omap with an actual poll instead of a guess estimation. Heck, the percentage should probably be a bit higher on the top frequencies as people play it safe and don't go as far. Notice even numbers (ending in 00) are higher than odd ones.

 

[b1ueskycomp1ex]

This thread at maemo should provide a much more clearer insight about the overclocking capabilities of the omap with an actual poll instead of a guess estimation. Heck, the percentage should probably be a bit higher on the top frequencies as people play it safe and don't go as far. Notice even numbers (ending in 00) are higher than odd ones.

It's sort of looking the the average user should be able to hit 1000Mhz with little trouble.

 

[mali]

Those Maemo percentages and poll results are not conclusive, imo. Some people didn't even understand how to vote right :rolleyes:
That percentage list is just made up by someone without any actual results backing it up and refers to a fixed vsel value the guy specified in his custom kernel.
My personal guesstimate is that everyone who manages to overclcock above 800MHz at the current vsel setting will have no problem hitting 1GHz, so that should be 100% right now(or did anyone not reach 800MHz?)
The Milestone list I posted a few pages back contains input from more users and the way they did their overclocking plays an important role too. The maemo guys had custom kernels with preset vsel values while the Milestone guys used a freely configurable way allowing all clock-vsel combos and leaving out all the discussions that influenced people one way or the other.
If the maemo guys would make a new poll _today_, things would look differently and more similar to the Milestone results, I'm sure.

 

[Elanzer]

Alot of the people on the Maemo forums are also the type who aren't willing to experiment or "risk" their device, ie: they'll take a kernel preset for 900mhz.. it works, maybe try 1000mhz... it crashes, so they assume 900mhz is the highest.

Alot won't try changing the voltages or bother trying to go higher at all, and will vote the highest their device is capable of is 900mhz. Out of 3 different N900s I've played with, all 3 of them do 1150mhz fine and the voltages varied very little - I would be pretty surprised if one was incapable of even 1ghz, it would be a drastically different binning if it didn't, since all of them have required very little voltage for 1ghz stable.

As for heat generation on these CPUs, you have to realize that we're talking heat dissipation of less than a single watt even while these CPUs are overclocked. Increasing the CPU's heat output by 300mw isn't going to suddenly make the device melt itself.