Database Info

[Q] CPU Setting Question

As the thread states, I obviously have a question about SetCPU and processor settings.
Is it better to have the processor underclocked and almost always using 100% to use programs, or it better off to overclock and have more processing power without using 100% or close to that mark.
And what would be more beneficial for battery life.
Edit: And if mods could move this to Q&A. Clicked the wrong forum.
Thanks,
Cyanide

Cyanidex00 said:
As the thread states, I obviously have a question about SetCPU and processor settings.
Is it better to have the processor underclocked and almost always using 100% to use programs, or it better off to overclock and have more processing power without using 100% or close to that mark.
And what would be more beneficial for battery life.
Edit: And if mods could move this to Q&A. Clicked the wrong forum.
Thanks,
Cyanide
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Actually we could use some hard evidence regarding this. Theories are theories, but actual experience is golden. Maybe you could try some various processor settings are report back?

Well, before I posted this I was using 245/886 underclocked with 245/245 screen off profile. At the end of the day I had an average about 75-80% percent battery life with pretty moderate to heavy usage.
I'm current using 245/1574 overclocked and will report back, with same screen off profile.
And yes, I did wipe battery stats before I started this.

Cyanidex00 said:
Well, before I posted this I was using 245/886 underclocked with 245/245 screen off profile. At the end of the day I had an average about 75-80% percent battery life with pretty moderate to heavy usage.
I'm current using 245/1574 overclocked and will report back, with same screen off profile.
And yes, I did wipe battery stats before I started this.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Cool, thanks for that info. Are you finding that forcing a 245 mhz screen off speed is impacting any apps running while your screen is off (e.g. music playing apps)? A couple of weeks ago I tried forcing the screen off at 122 mhz to see if that would help battery life, but I had big problems with music apps stuttering. I didn't play around with the speeds to see if raising the forced minimum to 245 would have fixed the problem. Some kernels advertise as a feature "Max speed - screen off 576MHz" or some other speed, but I don't know if it needs to be that high or not, for app stability.

I personally haven't tried any music or apps running while screen is off, I'll give it a whirl when I get home from work.
I know this obviously will vary from phone to phone, and how the user uses the phone. I'm pretty moderate to heavy usage daily. Hopefully maybe we can compile some data on what works for people.

I have my screen off profile set at 245 and have no problem streaming music from my SD card with the screen off. When streaming from the cloud, I sometimes get a very long pause between songs that isn't there with the screen on. I will try raising my screen off speed to see if that changes anything.
Sent from my Desire HD using XDA Premium App

henrybravo said:
Cool, thanks for that info. Are you finding that forcing a 245 mhz screen off speed is impacting any apps running while your screen is off (e.g. music playing apps)? A couple of weeks ago I tried forcing the screen off at 122 mhz to see if that would help battery life, but I had big problems with music apps stuttering. I didn't play around with the speeds to see if raising the forced minimum to 245 would have fixed the problem. Some kernels advertise as a feature "Max speed - screen off 576MHz" or some other speed, but I don't know if it needs to be that high or not, for app stability.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I noticed this yesterday. My screen off is also 245. My music stuttered, but only once (and it was fairly brief).

I raised the screen off speed to 368 and have not had any sputtering or long pauses between songs, even when streaming from the cloud.
Sent from my Inspire 4G using the power of the dark side.

biglittlegato said:
I raised the screen off speed to 368 and have not had any sputtering or long pauses between songs, even when streaming from the cloud.
Sent from my Inspire 4G using the power of the dark side.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Good to know, thanks!

Cyanidex00 said:
As the thread states, I obviously have a question about SetCPU and processor settings.
Is it better to have the processor underclocked and almost always using 100% to use programs, or it better off to overclock and have more processing power without using 100% or close to that mark.
And what would be more beneficial for battery life.
Edit: And if mods could move this to Q&A. Clicked the wrong forum.
Thanks,
Cyanide
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I use SetCPU at 460/1152 brazilianwax, screen off 122/537 conservative and have good battery life and no issues when playing music w/ screenoff....

Overclocking is almost guaranteed to worsen battery life compared to say if it was at stock 1 ghz or a little less.
With a governor like on demand, its gonna scale from the lowest to to highest allowed as soon as it gets some load on it, eg from 245mhz to whatever Max is (1017, 1075, or 1920 etc), without stopping in between.
Even conservative with fast scaling will probably scale close to Max clock speed pretty quickly under load, so theoretically this should be a /little/ better for battery than on demand, but will not seem as fast and could possibly make the phone seem more laggy. Smartass is very similiar to conservative as it scales depending on a preset % of CPU load. If its set to 70%, when CPU reaches 70% load, it scales to next frequency, when that frequently hits 70% load, its scales again. The version of the on demand governor most of us have in out kernels is the fastest scaling option, which goes from min CPU - straight to max

Optimal Undervolt/OC Settings

So I have a few apps... Voltage Control, SetCPU, No-Frills CPU... but I've honestly been a bit weary to use them. I want the best battery life since I'm a heavy user, but I also don't want to overclock/set voltage to a point where I'll screw up my phone. I'll admit that I'm a novice user when it comes to voltage/overclocking, but not when it comes to ROMs, kernels, bootloaders, etc. I work with those all the time, but really trying to get the most out of the battery and CPU.
There's this thread I found that has someone's settings on it, but don't know if its good or how much this guy knows(no offense to him):
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1356211
Anyone got any insight or perhaps screenies of their optimally tested settings? VERY VERY appreciated to anyone that can help.

jgruberman said:
So I have a few apps... Voltage Control, SetCPU, No-Frills CPU... but I've honestly been a bit weary to use them. I want the best battery life since I'm a heavy user, but I also don't want to overclock/set voltage to a point where I'll screw up my phone. I'll admit that I'm a novice user when it comes to voltage/overclocking, but not when it comes to ROMs, kernels, bootloaders, etc. I work with those all the time, but really trying to get the most out of the battery and CPU.
There's this thread I found that has someone's settings on it, but don't know if its good or how much this guy knows(no offense to him):
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1356211
Anyone got any insight or perhaps screenies of their optimally tested settings? VERY VERY appreciated to anyone that can help.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
there is no rule. every cpu is different. very different. my captivate took a lot of effort to get a meer 1300 mhz but my infuses get 1600 no problem at all. some infuses wont go to 1600 but more will go to 1500 than galaxy s's. they probably held out the best testing cpu's for the higher clocked phone.
for battery life try clocking @ 800 mhz and dont use screen off profiles just because it looks like a good idea to slow the cpu when you arent really using it(causes problems if the max freq is too low with some kernels) and test stability with your uv settings, go down a little at a time, for max frequency uv from the top down, for battery life go from the bottom up and disable the upper freqs if they become unstable. this is because rapid voltage changes can contribute to instability. too much differential will cause crashes if the uv is extreme or the oc is extreme.
at some point though the cpu settings will have a limited effect. the radios use battery as well. manage your screen brightness and try edge only with the screen off using any number of apps that manage the radio. try one of entropys kernels to avoid a feature of the wifi chip (or was it bt) from sucking power when in proximity of another device with the same chip. turn off sync if you dont need push emails from gmail or real time facebook updates and if you really need battery life get in the habit of togging wifi and bt and gps on and off depending on need. i do none on this because i always found the battery life adequate on samsung phones but on my aria, well it was a must and prolly why people hate android. htc and battery life dont go together unless you manually manage the phone functions.

That's a great bunch of information. I currently keep my Brightness at 0%, GPS off, Wifi only ON when I'm at work when the charger is plugged in.
I guess I'm more concerned with the undervolting than the overclocking. I'd rather preserve the battery life with undervolting... the overclocking isnt a HUGE concern, but it'd be nice to see. Regardless, if you have any "ideal" UV settings, or ones that have worked for YOUR Infuse(assuming you have one), then I'd love to see them.

at one point i had -200mv on every freq from 100-1600mhz and no crashes. i started manually editing the uv script (voltage control is only able to write -200 into the script unless you have the pay version) and forgot what i ended up with. but my first infuse was exceptional in that area. some infuses freeze above 1400 mhz no matter what voltage settings are used. about -50 seems to be safe 99% of the time with minor or no overclock across the board but you could probably go -50 down low and -100 from 400mhz up to 1200 and -50 or -75 on overclock freqs. with underclock or atleast no overclock it's probably safe to go -100 to -150. it may be safe to go much more than that as well but on a small number of phones that might be too far as it is. cpus are made on such a small scale that microns of inconsistency make large percentages of difference. many dont pass testing and qc. some are borderline for the application, some are exceptional. the smaller the architecture gets the more potential the design has for speed but the larger the variance in performance is given a manufacturing technique. obviously the manufacturing gets better and better combating this so that they can make smaller architectures they also have redundancy built in, but sometimes they just disable features of a chipset and market it as an economy version if they have a low pass rate. ever see a 3 core cpu for a pc? most are manufactured as 4 cores and on many motherboards the bios can unlock the 4th core with somewhat unpredictable results.

Again, some really great info for the technical guys such as myself. What is the best way to test the UV settings? The built in tools and stuff in SetCPU? Or is there another way that would be more effective and/or would get more realistic results?

CPU Tuner - Questions regarding maximum frequencies, profiles, and triggers.

This is my third time typing this... (This website should really have an auto-save draft feature)
I recently installed the application "CPU Tuner" because I've always wanted to utilize my newly rooted phone. The phone is running Cyanogenmod 7.2 Stable, and currently overclocked at 1.5GHz. My main concern is overclocking my phone that high. Now, I didn't really choose that option, SetCPU automatically set it to that when it loaded a configuration. I'm a beginner to overclocking, and this is my first time doing it for anything. I've heard rumors of people melting their processors from overclocking it, so I want to know if it's okay if its overclocked to roughly twice the stock frequency of 800MHz. If it IS safe, then why isn't the phone automatically set to 1GHz to compare to it's twin, the Evo 4G? Or perhaps even 1.2GHz to surpass it? I would definitely be satisfied with 1.2GHz, but I wouldn't mind having 1.5GHz if it was stable and didn't drain the battery. On to the next question, would an OC this high cause instability and/or would it drain my battery? I only overclocked an hour ago, so I haven't experienced any problems whatsoever... yet. On to the profiles... I'd like some suggestions for improving my triggers. Right now, it set everything up to the highest frequency, but looking at the help, it said to not touch the frequency, but experiment with thresholds. In the Help, it doesn't tell you what the thresholds are, and what they do, and more importantly, how they work. It just shows that the highest is the most battery saving. I would have thought the lower the better, but... Anyway, if you could tell me, I'd be highly appreciated it. Finally, the battery temperature... It has an option to enable a setting to change profiles if the battery gets a certain temperature, but I'd like to know what would be considered "Overheating". I get paranoid when the battery temperature gets a little warm at around 36 Celsius... but the profile it switches to is supposed to really slow down the CPU to preserve battery, so I'd really rather not use it unless it's necessary. So, would 45 - 50 Celsius do, or should I set it a bit lower? My battery is 4000+ mV, if that'd help at all. If you know any sources that you can direct me to that would answer my questions, it'd be highly appreciated.

Wow ok . Well first off check out THIS thread. It will explain a lot about Governors, I/O Schedulers, and a bunch of the questions you have. As for people melting CPUs, I've never actually seen it happen, or know anyone who has had it happen on the Shift. That's not to say it's not possible. It may be, just not probable. The Shift processor compared to the OG EVO's is much better. The Shift even at the stock 800mHz out performs the EVO's processor at 1000mHz. That is in part because it is a 2nd Gen processor vs the EVO's 1st Gen Unit. The Battery Temp should try and always be kept below 115-120 Degrees Fahrenheit. I use SetCPU, and have a Profile that kicks in to lower the OC to around Stock should the Battery Temp every reach 110 Degrees Fahrenheit. My setting are 61mHz Min 1516mHz Max, Smartass V2 Governor, and SIO Scheduler. But every device is different, so your going to have to do a bit of experimenting till you find what works for you. If you get a lot of Random Reboots, lower your Max OC setting, or try a different Governor. BTW where did you get a 4000mAh Battery?

prboy1969 said:
Wow ok . Well first off check out THIS thread. It will explain a lot about Governors, I/O Schedulers, and a bunch of the questions you have. As for people melting CPUs, I've never actually seen it happen, or know anyone who has had it happen on the Shift. That's not to say it's not possible. It may be, just not probable. The Shift processor compared to the OG EVO's is much better. The Shift even at the stock 800mHz out performs the EVO's processor at 1000mHz. That is in part because it is a 2nd Gen processor vs the EVO's 1st Gen Unit. The Battery Temp should try and always be kept below 115-120 Degrees Fahrenheit. I use SetCPU, and have a Profile that kicks in to lower the OC to around Stock should the Battery Temp every reach 110 Degrees Fahrenheit. My setting are 61mHz Min 1516mHz Max, Smartass V2 Governor, and SIO Scheduler. But every device is different, so your going to have to do a bit of experimenting till you find what works for you. If you get a lot of Random Reboots, lower your Max OC setting, or try a different Governor. BTW where did you get a 4000mAh Battery?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for the response. It's pretty late, so I've bookmarked the link to read tomorrow. Alright, so 45 degrees Celsius should the maximum then. I've been thinking of switching over to SetCPU, since there are more comprehensive guides than for CPU Tuner (In which no one seems to have heard about), and it doesn't seem that the settings it set will be ideal for the long run. Although, before I switch over to SetCPU, I want to at least give it a shot. I'll change my settings so that the frequency decreases depending on battery level. Also, I don't have much but the basic governors and configurations on CPU Tuner, so I've never heard of Smartass V2 (Prior to skimming through the link you posted). Also, the battery came with it, I knew it seemed a bit different from most other batteries (From what I've seen in searches, most of them had around 2000), but I didn't know it meant that much.

The Governor settings available will depend on the Kernel, not on the CPU Controller. I've always been partial to SetCPU, but that's just me. I would again suggest doing a bit of reading, and experimentation to find your best settings. But defiantly the closer to normal the Battery temperature is the better. When the Battery heats up to much it will in most cases also drain faster. If you can post a Pic of the Battery I would really like to see it. I've never come across a 400mAh Battery for the Shift.

When I first rooted my shift 2 years ago I was very concerned of over-heating. I constantly checked the temperature. After a while I realized it is quite hard to over heat and cause damage, especially with the newest kernels the devs have put out. Just experiment with different settings and see what works best for your phone
Sent from my PG06100 using xda app-developers app

Battery discussion, No more heat, 2 days battery life, Same Performance

The Problem With The S4 That It Has More Cpu Then It Needs. It Doesnt Have To Use It Cpu Up To 1600 Mhz, But It Automatically Does,
It Works Perfectly At 2 Cores And 800 Mhz, No Difference, Only A Better Experience , Please Read On
Ok Guys, This Will Be The Battery Discussion Page For The S4, We Will Be Doing Kernel And Under Volting Test, And Ways To Save Battery,
We Will Post Battery Records Here, And Many Other Things, This Is How It Works
I Will Post Mine Tomorrow After Fully Charging
Must Be Fully Charged Till 5 Percent Charge Without Pluging In Cable In Between,
And You Must Use Your Device As You Would Everyday
Install Cpu Spy
This Is The Layout You Fill In For Your Post
ROM:
KERNEL:
CPU MIN:
CPU MAX:
CPU GOVERNOR:
CORES ONLINE:
CORES OFFLINE:
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Information Of How You Used Your Phone During The Process
And Any Other Information Like The Apps You Have Installed, And The App You Use To Save Battery With, Or Your
App Alternatives For Better Battery Life
Attach Photos (screenshots) Of Your Battery Record, Stats, And On Screen Time Using The Stock App In The Settings
And Your Cpu Spy Page
"i For One Have 2 Cores Offline And Under Volted To 250-800 On Both Online Cores And Have The Ondemand Governor Activated, And I Havent Felt Performance Lost, Runs Temple Run And Subway Surfers Perfectly, And No Heat, Even If Im Charging With Wifi On And Im Downloading Something, Its Great

Seems to be a nice idea. But could you elaborate as on why the text is bold and you had to use capslock for 1/2 of it!?

@slind ok i fixed the post. i will be posting links to the posts who are great battery savers without loosing performance

So basically, we use an I9500 like an Ace or a Grand to get rid of heating and battery drains.. Andyou suggest that it won't result in performance loss. I'd suggest playing games that are more graphically intensive and not just Temple Run.. Try copying data from one memory card to another, or simply try running a Full HD Video. Also, check out web browsing or maybe multitasking, and you'll see where the performance dies out.
I think the fix should come in the upcoming releases of stock firmware by Samsung. By turning off a couple of cores, you're only going back a couple of years. I don't think I upgraded from the S3 to S4 for that reason.

cabloomi said:
The Problem With The S4 That It Has More Cpu Then It Needs. It Doesnt Have To Use It Cpu Up To 1600 Mhz, But It Automatically Does,
It Works Perfectly At 2 Cores And 800 Mhz, No Difference, Only A Better Experience , Please Read On
Ok Guys, This Will Be The Battery Discussion Page For The S4, We Will Be Doing Kernel And Under Volting Test, And Ways To Save Battery,
We Will Post Battery Records Here, And Many Other Things, This Is How It Works
I Will Post Mine Tomorrow After Fully Charging
Must Be Fully Charged Till 5 Percent Charge Without Pluging In Cable In Between,
And You Must Use Your Device As You Would Everyday
Install Cpu Spy
This Is The Layout You Fill In For Your Post
Information Of How You Used Your Phone During The Process
And Any Other Information Like The Apps You Have Installed, And The App You Use To Save Battery With, Or Your
App Alternatives For Better Battery Life
Attach Photos (screenshots) Of Your Battery Record, Stats, And On Screen Time Using The Stock App In The Settings
And Your Cpu Spy Page
"i For One Have 2 Cores Offline And Under Volted To 250-800 On Both Online Cores And Have The Ondemand Governor Activated, And I Havent Felt Performance Lost, Runs Temple Run And Subway Surfers Perfectly, And No Heat, Even If Im Charging With Wifi On And Im Downloading Something, Its Great
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
post some screenshots with your screen time.

@adyscorpius
everyone has there preferences and there needs in a phone. and there own settings. and this is a Battery discussion thread. we will be doing many performance and voltage mods, so everyone could choose the settings that suits them. now please dont post aggressive post like that, im not stupid. i know that my settings are very low.
but for my most played games and most used apps. it doesnt seem to effect my performance, so im comfortable with my settings

i had the phone for 2 weeks, happily showing off battery performance and then i asked myself again, why the heck i bought this phone in the first place? BECAUSE IT HAS REPLACABLE BATTERY!.. LOL.. how silly i am trying to squeeze that little drop of power out of the battery when I can double the battery just by getting another spare.
no need to turn off anything, no need to drop performance or screen brightness.. just pure enjoyment of the full potential without worrying battery problem.. just get a spare.

cabloomi said:
@adyscorpius
everyone has there preferences and there needs in a phone. and there own settings. and this is a Battery discussion thread. we will be doing many performance and voltage mods, so everyone could choose the settings that suits them. now please dont post aggressive post like that, im not stupid. i know that my settings are very low.
but for my most played games and most used apps. it doesnt seem to effect my performance, so im comfortable with my settings
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I didn't mean to be aggresive and sorry if you felt like that. All I mean is, there is a limit to which you can undervolt/underclock your phone without losing the functionality or speed. While underclocking to 1.0 ghz or 1.2 ghz sounds kinda normal, going all the way down to 800 Mhz and that too only on two cores is like running Galaxy Ace Dual Core instead. Why would I want to spoil my S4 for it?
That is all that I meant. And the phone is normally shelling out a good day's use in normal usage. Why bother so much about battery really???

My S4 i9505 came with MDE ROM from the factory, apart from doing dirty flashes over dirty flashes, finally someone came up with a recovery which is working. So i've :
1. Formatted system , cache , dalvik
2. Loaded in Djembey's stock slim deodexed ME2 ROM.
3. Using PimpMyROM, did some moderately less aggressive tweaks.
4. Capped the Max frequency at 1674MHz. Interactive gov, Noop sched.
5. Fully charged and unplugged.
6. Fully on 3G . Gmail sync for calendars, contacts, mail, keep, notes. Moderately heavy on Gtalk and Whatsapp. Browsing news and websites.
Observed 4 hours screen time.
Almost 15 hours of total usage + standby (This doesn't mean much, screen time depicts usage time more)
The phone still feels warmer than S2, under operation.
I've yet to try faux kernel yet, but i doubt it would get much better than this. The physical limit i feel is on the CPU, HD AMOLEDs, and the modem itself under normal usage.
Feel free to comment.

Hi,
hope you may be able to help. I have been trying almost everthing to increase the music volume as the s4 does not drive my senheiser headphones as well I would like. Is it possible to increase the gain through a kernel mod somehow?

Wow you're really random. This thread isn't even remotely discussing about the issue you raised.
Try the omega ROM thread, see if the functionality list includes volume hack.
Sent from my GT-I9505 using xda app-developers app

How does one go about disabling two of the cores ? c:

Best CPU settings in Kernel Aduitor for good battery life

I am running MoKee with pretty decent battery life but am currently experimenting with reducing screen resolution and tweaking CPU & GPU settings (using Kernel Aduitor) to see if I can squeeze more out of a charge. Not really sure what the best settings are to maximise battery while keeping smooth everyday performance (I don't game or do any very heavy tasks or multitasking). I thought that it might be possible to get near SD625 stamina from the SD820 seeing as they are both built on the 14nm process, but the architecture is very different (ours has the quad-core big little set up with kryo, as opposed to the 625's octa-core A53 set up). At the moment I am trying it with the little cores left at default and the big cores max frequency down clocked by about 25%. I haven't changed the governors. I also down clocked the GPU max frequency a bit. Anyone have any advice regarding an optimal set up?

Not sure about the best settings but for sure I'm waiting for your feedback regarding this change and battery life. It should be improving it, but nobody knows how much.
Also I've noticed that in youtube if there is 720p or 1080p, the default setting is 720p (of course our screen is a multiple of 720p).
Are the pixels visible?

Couldn't see pixels with reduced screen resolution, even at 720p. Of course it's only rendering a lower resolution image then stretching it over the physical
1440p display. The result is just a softer image. Looks a bit strange, but 1080p wasn't too bad. However, didn't seem to have any effect on battery life and surprisingly at 720p I got a worse Antutu score than normal, so I have given up and returned to 2K.

I feel sorry for that I was really hoping for some way to increase the battery life a bit.

Hey guys... Today I found something interesting in our German Android forum. There's a group of people who are developing a great Rom for our device. It's just called the telegram Rom.
So the Rom will include scripts tweaks and a full working app for changing governors. So you will be able to get a much better battery life. The German guys talking about 20 to 30 percent extra power for our device.
The hole project behind this was founded here on xda but mainly developed for the Oneplus-3.
But in fact the whole workaround is working on any device that's running a SD820 processor.
Here is the link to the site
https://forum.xda-developers.com/oneplus-3/how-to/advanced-interactive-governor-tweaks-t3476589
So maybe you like to have a look. There are also complete explanations of how the SD820 works related to energy management and voltage at minimal and maximum clock speed!
I hope this can answer your questions.

Thanks for sharing Lizard82.
I follow the thread and use AKT... i am using the profile called Project Zhana & X.A.N.A v4.2. 14 hr sot is unheard of but I am getting close to 6hrs sot with xposed loaded which I am already impressed. It is is way better then what I used to get around 3 hrs sot. I am running revolution 21s rom which is very similar to EUI and not the most optimized rom with heavy battery drain. and I am happy that this phone finally has a good battery life. Appreciate Lizard82.

The sot really depends of what you do with the phone, and what apps run when the phone is on idle. I changed the resolution to 1080p but didn't notice any difference, so I went back to 1440p. There are tons of threads about kernel Adiutor, you won't have a hard time finding it

For best battery on Nougat I did this on Nexus 7.1 and AOSP 7.1 roms with BS kernel:
- Use rom that can use Black Screen kernel 2.1/2.2 or later
- Use kernel Adiutor to change CPU governor to impulse (or Darkness)
- Set value in Govenor tuneable (locate just under CPU Governor touch it to go inside to change value) : highspeed_freq to 307200, set Powersave_Bias to 1. I changed both BIG and LITTLE CPU core in kernel Adiutor.
- I think keep AKT profile on stock/unchange no need to set it is ok