how safe is overclocking?

[kylexedge]

I've read through the forums and found a couple responses to my question, and I wanted to see if I could get a couple more. If I bump up LJP to 520 from 312 on my Palm Centro to play SNES roms smoothly, is this going to harm my phone?

[coder12]

Overclocking is fairly safe once you know what you're doing. Most programs will set a limit, and if you want to overclock on your centro then you'll need lightspeed, which sets limits iirc. For the Centro (and most other PXA 270 devices), I believe the highest you can/should o.clock it is 585 mhz.

[_Em]

The PXA 270 devices have many different quality grades; originally, they were supposed to have a top speed of 624MHz, but due to some lower quality chips, plus data busses that can't feed data to the chip reliably at that high a speed, 585MHz is the accepted maximum. At that speed, the worst that's likely to happen is your device will lock up and need a manual reset if something goes wrong -- the chip won't overheat and become damaged until it's over 624MHz.

Of course, clock speed and power consumption go hand in hand -- the higher the speed, the less battery life you'll have. I usually underclock to around 200MHz now for most apps; it really boosts my time between charges

[icefire]

The PXA 270 processors are natively at the 585mhz, but Palm has them underclocked by default. so overclocking is fine.

[sinnedone]

I have overclockedall my Treos since my 650. Not one issue as far as harming the Phone

Jul 11, 2008 17:15:46 GMT 1 _Em said:

I usually underclock to around 200MHz now for most apps; it really boosts my time between charges

Kind of off topic but have you noticed a definate increase in Batt life? What about things that run in background like email/backup/im......any problems with those?

Ive been meaning to underclock the whole system on my 755 but dont want to run into problems since I usually have mundu and versamail in background along with nightly backups.

[luckyluke]

200 Mhz should be enough even for Versa Mail and Mundu in the background! I own beside my Centro (which I like more) a Pocket PC which I can underclock with factory tools down to 200Mhz. Even then I can run several background application, like Messenger, Wifi connection, ... and Windows Mobile is a real multi tasking system, not an interupt (over alarms) driven such as Palm OS. But this doesn´t have to mean anything.

[_Em]

Ditto with my T|X. And my battery life is approximately 8 hours (5 hours at 312MHz default). The biggest battery saver is dimming your backlight however.