SetCPU

[Tuftslax]

Hey guys, had a question about SetCPU. I've seen it mentioned a lot as a powerful tool after rooting, but I haven't seen a lot of information about using it. Has anyone had experience using this on the X? I'm more interested in the underclocking/decreasing voltage tweaks to increase battery life. If it was free I would try some stuff myself but for a paid app I'd rather not waste money when I can't change enough or dont know what to change.

I guess all I'm asking for is if there are known guidelines/settings that have been shown to work already for the X.

 

[greydarrah]

The settings for SetCPU are pretty robust. You can create profiles that are applied in a hierarchical manor. For example, if your battery is at or less than 100%, your cpu can be set to run at 1ghz max and 300hz min when the screen is on, when the screen is off, you can set the max and min to 300hz, when your battery goes below 40% you can tell it to run at 800hz max and below 30% set max to 600hz (stretching much more time out of that last 30%). All of the numbers mentioned are customizable. It and Easy Root are well worth the few bucks they cost. I'm going to bed at midnight with 30% of my battery left. Before doing this, I was having to recharge late afternoon just about every day.

If I knew how to add a picture to my post, I'd include some screen captures of my settings.

 

[Tuftslax]

Is there a noticeable performance change when decreasing the cpu? I imagine when the screen is off there is little to know effect but what about actually using the phone?

Also, does anyone have any insight into changing the voltage?

I'm really just looking for that extra oomph to get me through the day. I think I get about 12 hours on a charge with daily use, so usually I need a boost in the late afternoon especially if I'm expecting a late night

 

[greydarrah]

To my knowledge, there are no voltage adjustments anywhere in SetCPU. I do not notice any performance issues even when below 30% and running my max cpu at 600hz, but I'm not running any intense games, nor do I have a science lab to run official performance test. It's doing for me exactly what you described wanting...getting me through the day without having to plug back in.

 

[srh.pres.usx]

There is a little sluggishness when waking the phone up, since its idling at 300 MHz. But otherwise, I havent seen much performance degradation using similar profiling to the above.

 

[Tuftslax]

Sounds good, looks like I'm going to take the plunge and test this out. Ill probably spring for an extended battery at some point so a 2 dollar investment to maybe not have to do that is nothing on the grand scheme of things

 

[InfamousDX]

Is there a noticeable performance change when decreasing the cpu? I imagine when the screen is off there is little to know effect but what about actually using the phone?

Also, does anyone have any insight into changing the voltage?

I'm really just looking for that extra oomph to get me through the day. I think I get about 12 hours on a charge with daily use, so usually I need a boost in the late afternoon especially if I'm expecting a late night

Check the other Droid forums; there are plenty of guides. The voltage is what really saves the day for battery life. Stock vsel value for the DX is 66 @ 1GHz. I am one of the lucky few who overclocked WHILE dropping vsel by almost half. I'm at 1.15GHz @ 34 vsel. My battery life is AMAZING right now.

 

[Tuftslax]

I just actually found those posts today. Already ordered an extended battery and am going to try this tweaks tonight or tomorrow. Is really like to be able to use my phone all day how it was meant to be. Not with crippled data and a screen on ten percent brightness

 

[largeselection]

It's def helpful in my experience. I managed to get to the end of the day with 30% vs before setcpu when I hit 30% by like 5

 

[blile]

Can others post screen shots of your "ideal" settings, and why you say its "ideal." Ive been playing with diff settings, but I dont know what Im doing.

Any help would be great.
Thanks

 

[funkyreuben]

Check the other Droid forums; there are plenty of guides. The voltage is what really saves the day for battery life. Stock vsel value for the DX is 66 @ 1GHz. I am one of the lucky few who overclocked WHILE dropping vsel by almost half. I'm at 1.15GHz @ 34 vsel. My battery life is AMAZING right now.

What do you mean by lucky few? Are results not consistent from dx to dx?

 

[dukeslb56]

Probably a stupid question but what do the different scaling modes mean (ondemand, userspace, and performance)?

 

[pinhead875]

I posted this elsewhere, so here's my SetCPU settings:

Here's what I have so far on this charge (see that display is 55% of batter power used since last unplug, lot's of screen use - on auto brightness; I have AutoKiller set to aggressive; SetCPU settings below; Timerrific settings below).

 

[Tuftslax]

What do you mean by lucky few? Are results not consistent from dx to dx?

Apparently its common with all electronics that the cpu chips aren't created "equal". Very minor differences result just as a product of production and manufacturing. Now, for normal use these differences are undetectable but when you start pushing the cpu to higher levels and lowering the stock voltage settings they can become apparent.

After reading up on everything I have mine OCed to 1.1 and dropped the voltage to 36. I tried 34 but had a couple reboots, increased the voltage a little bit and now no problems.

 

[Tuftslax]

Oh and by the way, I mentioned this on the android forums but I dont think screenshots and referring to the percentage with your display means anything to anybody. Its much more practical and comparable to just put the actual time your display is on.

 

[DaRkL3AD3R]

Hey tuftslax you said you're OC'ed to 1.1 @36vsel, are you running Froyo 2.2 or are you still just rooted 2.1?

I want to know because I've finally decided to dive into the phone overclocking scene and I heard some rumors that OC does NOT work on 2.2. Just want to know if you can verify and if so mind writing up a quick tutorial with files? I know asking a lot but I would be very thankful if you could help me out with this one! Thanks!

 

[Tuftslax]

No problem at all. First off you are correct in what you heard, as of right now you can't overclock the 2.2 build. I believe people are working on that (people much smarter than me and who have a better idea of what they are doing) so I cant say when anything will come from that. It's actually one of the reasons I rolled back to 2.1 from 2.2 (in addition to some of the bugs).

I used the tutorial found here:
[How-to] Overclock that survives a reboot - Android Forums

In the first post if you scroll down you'll see something like "you can do all this in root explorer", thats what I used. Although my caveat and something cautioned in that post is to make sure your phone runs well at the setscaling.sh script before you add on the install-recovery (I think) that reloads it at a reboot. Its not a big deal to run it through without that.

So in a nutshell I
1) put the file on my sd card and extracted them
2) put overclock.ko, overclock.sh, and setscaling.sh where they go
3) opened setscaling.sh in text editor through root explorer (long press on it for options)
4) changed my settings (I'll copy it from my phone in the next post)
5) selected it and "executed" setscaling.sh

 

[Tuftslax]

echo 36 > /proc/overclock/max_vsel
echo 1100000 > /proc/overclock/max_rate
echo 1 400000000 22 > /proc/overclock/mpu_opps
echo 2 600000000 26 > /proc/overclock/mpu_opps
echo 3 900000000 30 > /proc/overclock/mpu_opps
echo 4 1100000000 36 > /proc/overclock/mpu_opps
echo 0 1100000 > /proc/overclock/freq_table
echo 1 900000 > /proc/overclock/freq_table
echo 2 600000 > /proc/overclock/freq_table
echo 3 400000 > /proc/overclock/freq_table


That's what my setscaling file looks like, I changed the max to 1.1 and raised the voltage from I think 34 to 36. Just be careful with the number of digits if you change anything

 

[Tuftslax]

Also when/if you set it so it wont be erased on a reboot you obviously dont need to execute setscaling as the install-recovery script does it automatically.

 

[DaRkL3AD3R]

Great! Thanks much for posting this, very helpful. I will certainly be doing this, but probably will wait till its rolled over to 2.2 as I have been having a lot of luck with Froyo and want to sit tight on it. I'm sure this will be updated for Froyo soon enough though. Thanks again