Overclocking safely?


If you've set your max OPP to OPP4 then it'll be OPP4 all the time, meaning it will remain like that and never change unless you manually change it again.
 
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And now for a noobie question...


What exactly is it you do when overclocking? Is it simply allowing the machine to send more calculations trough the gates of the chip?
 
I can't help thinking that overclocking is a bit of a non-topic.


As long as you don't go stupid and cause the SoC to fail through overheating and I suspect instabilities would be a guard against that.


Any foreshortening of SoC life needs to be brought in to context. Its longevity is still likely to be far greater that any of the other components. How many keyboards, nubs and shoulder buttons would you get through in 5 years of CONSTANT use. As keen as I am for getting the Pandora and I have many many ideas to put it to use. I seriously doubt I will noticeably impact the lifespan of the SoC.


Another point, as the LCD uses up a lot of the power then, as a percentage of total draw, overclocking is not a major factor.


I suspect I'll be in the desktop a large amount of the time. I'll crank her up until that nice and responsive and set the default there. Psx and on box compiling I guess I'll crank it up again. Time will tell.

Craigix said:
Best to keep it under 1Ghz.
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Glad to see you're getting some rest. 3am?
 
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Sigurd said:
And now for a noobie question...


What exactly is it you do when overclocking? Is it simply allowing the machine to send more calculations trough the gates of the chip?
Click to expand...
Basically. Mhz is a frequency. The greater the frequency the more instructions that can be executed in the same time. i.e. the box becomes quicker and more powerful.
 
Operating Point. The higher it is, the higher you can overclock your Pandora (push its processor harder, basically). If you go beyond OPP5 (default is 3), you will void your warranty.
 
ah ok


so opp1 and opp2 is for underclocking? opp3 is default clock and opp4 and opp5 is for overclocking, isn't it?
 
Isn't setting OPP changing the voltage? So changing the OPP value is over or underVOLTing. Changing the frequency is overclocking. The higher the voltage the more stable the high frequencies are.


At least that's what I think I know.
 
SONY said:
If you've set your max OPP to OPP4 then it'll be OPP4 all the time, meaning it will remain like that and never change unless you manually change it again.
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Wrong, you always set your maximum. So if you set it to 1.1Ghz and OPP5 and then only use it for writing something then it will probably rather run at 500Mhz OPP3 or below.


Overclocking is to just to increase the speed (the CPU has some clock which runs at a certain speed, and everything is done in it's "rhythm". You can easily make this clock run faster). But if you make it too fast something won't work anymore and crash/freeze (shut it down by holding the Pandora button and sliding the power switch to the right to shut it off when it freezes). This doesn't do (much?) damage, you just reboot and maybe take out your battery for a while and everything is fine if you set the the clock speed back to a lower number. The default clock speed is 500 or 600 Mhz (or even 720Mhz?), if they are overvolted some Pandoras (not all!) can go up to 1.1Ghz or a little more.


If you overvolt you increase the voltage which the CPU gets. If you do this you can overclock more, but at some time it will crash anyway. If you overvolt too much the chip will fry (meaning your Pandora is broken and the probably most expensive part needs to replaced to get it working again). The default is OPP3, if you go higher than OPP5 it will void your warranty.


overclocking won't (maybe a little?) shorten the life time of your Pandora.


overvolting will. If you ran your Pandora at OPP5 (as far overvolted as you can without losing your warranty) at 1Ghz (almost as fast as the fastest Pandoras can) all the time (meaning not only setting your maximum to it, but also using it 24/7 with an application which needs the full 1Ghz you have allowed it to use) it would statistically be broken after 5 years, instead of 10 when doing the same with 500Mhz and OPP3. Statistically. It can of course break way sooner or later.


Now I'm going to paste this into the Wiki if it isn't already there.
 
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A friend of mine just told me that he had to overclock in order to play a NES emulator; is that really the case?!


In addition, I'm hearing a bunch of different figures regarding shortened lifespan; some say from 20 to 15, some say 10 to 5, yet others have said 5-2.5 years... Who's right?
 
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Only if he used nesemu; that's a worthless piece of garbage. The other two NES emulators run perfectly.
 
zeldarocks said:
Blue Protoman said:
Only if he used nesemu; that's a worthless piece of garbage. The other two NES emulators run perfectly.
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What about the shortened lifespan figures?
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The reason you will not get an accurate answer on this is due to the fact that different usage patterns can greatly alter the answer.


For instance, I have a PDA (Dell Axim X3) That I have been using daily since 2003. I'm figuring that all my usage over the years would probably average out to about a hour a day. So I have about 3,000 hours of time used. Of course there are 3 modes on my processor, power save (200Mhz), Normal (400 Mhz) and Auto (200-400 selectable by system based on what is running) So If I am told my processor was rated say 10,000 hours, that would be 10,000 hours, non stop at 400Mhz. While I have used approximately 3000 hours, not all of these had the processor running at full speed. Even when set at 400 Mhz, in between running applications that really used a lot of processing power, it would be running slower or idle.


So basically what people are trying to say is, the Pandora CPU, running at Opp3 (standard) and 500Mhz (Standard) was rated at 40,000 hours (posted by someone so I will use this).


40,000 * 365 days (8,760 hours) = 4.57 years (rounded), so that would be 4.57 years of having the Pandora run a program that used the CPU at all 500Mhz non stop, then it MIGHT fail. As with any device this could happen sooner, it could happen later.


No one is going to use it for 4+ years solid, never stopping. So even if you ran it for 8 non stop hours full on, you suddenly have extended the 4.57 years to 13.96. SO you can see that since it is unlikely that a person would max the processor out for 8 solid hours again you have to figure that the life is well over 10 years. This variance is what has given you the different year numbers people have stated.


So if you used the last calculation, and said that you could run the processor non-stop for 8 hours a day and get almost 14 years, but overclocking would reduce this by half if you went to say 1Ghz, that would be almost 7 years of running the processor constantly at 1Ghz for 8 hours a day.


When you factor in the fact that you may not use the Pandora on some days, some you may use it all day but for a few minutes here and there, and some days you may play for hours on end, while even overclocked the processor will not always be running at the 1Ghz mark non stop, etc. You can see that what we are generally trying to say is that it is likely you will wear out the buttons, the batteries, the screen, or SOMETHING important long before the processor should die from being overworked.


I hope this helps in understanding.
 
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If you overvolt frequently, you may worry all you want. If you only overclock when necessary, you'll be fine.
 
One is far more likely to wear out some other (probably physical part) of the Pandora before the SOC burns out from overclocking...
 
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