I know, the Tegra K1 gets hot. Is this a widespread issue though (some people only report minor warmth)? How hot is too hot? Mine is getting stoopid hot, and I'm pissed because I finally have a unit with almost no issues, save the over heating problem. I know the SHIELD has issues with screen cracking, and the N9 should be safer with the metal band, but something doesn't seem right...
Iboschi said:
the Tegra K1 gets hot
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This.
combine that with a badly configured cpu governor that boosts the frequencies to 2+ ghz even for simple tasks that do not need all those cpu cycles.
In addition to the whopping 1.5ghz touchboost frequency (WTF google).
After rooting and fixing the last two points, I experience high temps only when playing games.
Blocking Ads also tremendously helps temps while web browsing.
I wouldn't consider it a problem. I also doubt you have a bad unit even though its getting hot. Chances are if you do the exact same things on 100 nexus 9's the temp will be very close. I've been looking through the kernel code for tegra throttling and doing some tests. The tests show it starts to very lightly throttle starting at 70c in my tests. I believe I saw in the kernel there is 3 throttling states basically, light, heavy, and one other I can't remember. Shutdown occurs at right above 100°c.
As far as the governor, I'm sure if it made sense gooe would have lowered it. But, if I remember right this was part of project butter to make the ui smooth, as well as some other things. I don't think touch boost is killing battery too bad, and I'm willing to sacrifice some for a smoother ui anyway.
Thisbis just a hit running CPU, no way around it and its not a defect, its just a side effect of a powerful CPU in this design. I also noticed although it heats up quick, it cools extrememly fast. Like dropping 15-20° in seconds, literally- so overall I don't think this is a huge problem, but if they can make it better, more power to them.
di11igaf said:
I wouldn't consider it a problem. I also doubt you have a bad unit even though its getting hot. Chances are if you do the exact same things on 100 nexus 9's the temp will be very close. I've been looking through the kernel code for tegra throttling and doing some tests. The tests show it starts to very lightly throttle starting at 70c in my tests. I believe I saw in the kernel there is 3 throttling states basically, light, heavy, and one other I can't remember. Shutdown occurs at right above 100°c.
As far as the governor, I'm sure if it made sense gooe would have lowered it. But, if I remember right this was part of project butter to make the ui smooth, as well as some other things. I don't think touch boost is killing battery too bad, and I'm willing to sacrifice some for a smoother ui anyway.
Thisbis just a hit running CPU, no way around it and its not a defect, its just a side effect of a powerful CPU in this design. I also noticed although it heats up quick, it cools extrememly fast. Like dropping 15-20° in seconds, literally- so overall I don't think this is a huge problem, but if they can make it better, more power to them.
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Click to collapse
im really happy to hear about your thought
but if the heat issue occurs many times, will it break the others hardware,
i have seen in laptop, if the graphics card heat too much, it can melt the motherboard and the others parts of the laptop,
im afraid that it will happen to this tablet eventually
i really love my nexus 9, just this heat issue make me incomfortable
Related
I just noticed that under heavy use such as decoding mkv the phone can get a bit hot. Especially in the upper part of the display under the samsung logo.
Anyone else experience this?
Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk
My SGS2 gets fairly hot when the CPU is busy on the backside right below the Camera, which is pretty much in the same place, just on the backside instead of frontside.
I'd say its normal behavior. I've noticed it is especially bad with applications or games, that use a lot of CPU cycles.
Being as powerful as it is, i wouldn't be surprised if the SGS2 uses up more power when the CPU is active then older phones. Power usage for doing the same amount of work should be lower then older phones. However some applications don't limit their CPU usage, and therefore you may end up using more power (phone getting hotter) then you would on older phones.
Well it is after all one of the thinnest and most powerful smartphones on the market.
Power = Heat
Thin = Little cooling space = Heat
Heat + Heat = Much heat
No way it's overheating though. I think that would be possible if you overclocked it but I'm fairly sure they've tested it for overheating with stock frequencies and voltages. If you read the manual it probably says that you're not supposed to use it for long periods of time in direct sunlight to prevent overheating, just like it says in almost every phone manual. At least iPhone shuts itself down if it gets too hot and I wouldn't be surprised if modern Android phones did that too.
Hi, I'm no expert, but 70°C is quite a lot, isn't it?
And I was only browsing market...
pepcza said:
Hi, I'm no expert, but 70°C is quite a lot, isn't it?
And I was only browsing market...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah...sounds way too hot to me
ImperialX said:
I just noticed that under heavy use such as decoding mkv the phone can get a bit hot. Especially in the upper part of the display under the samsung logo.
Anyone else experience this?
Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You said it yourself, "Heavy use", the S2 is just a handset after all, not PC with liquid cooling or something.
The CPU produces a lot of heat, it's a powerful CPU, the device is thin, so:
powerful hot CPU + thin choking case + long time heavy use + your warm hands all over the device playing games and surfing the web etc = very hot device.
Try maybe to change the kernel !
Not sure if it's normal but once my phone went up to 53 degrees c while charging. I unplugged it and waited, it went back to charging at 46 degrees c.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using XDA Premium App
Well I downloaded cpu master (free) to just mess around with my photon, and come to find out, the governor for the cpu is set to performance, but gave me the option to change it to powersave, so I switch it and I'll report back to you guys and see if I've found the holy Grail to even better battery life
Sent from my MoPho using XDA App
That's awesome
Sent from my MB855 using xda premium
Wait until I or another dev gets onDemand governor enabled...
I have SetCPU, and honestly, I haven't noticed a huge difference in battery life with powersave unless I seriously scale the CPU back to like 300 mhz. Then it'll last a while, if I don't do ANYTHING with it. For example, when I'm sleeping, otherwise, it just makes the phone laggy and doesn't seem to help enough to make it worth while. Just my opinion from screwing with it.
xTMFxOffshore said:
I have SetCPU, and honestly, I haven't noticed a huge difference in battery life with powersave unless I seriously scale the CPU back to like 300 mhz. Then it'll last a while, if I don't do ANYTHING with it. For example, when I'm sleeping, otherwise, it just makes the phone laggy and doesn't seem to help enough to make it worth while. Just my opinion from screwing with it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The general consensus regarding over/underclocking when I had my HTC Hero was that overclocking would save battery because you could get what you wanted done faster. If you scale the CPU back massively while it is set to sleep, however, you will save a lot of battery.
xTMFxOffshore said:
I have SetCPU, and honestly, I haven't noticed a huge difference in battery life with powersave unless I seriously scale the CPU back to like 300 mhz. Then it'll last a while, if I don't do ANYTHING with it. For example, when I'm sleeping, otherwise, it just makes the phone laggy and doesn't seem to help enough to make it worth while. Just my opinion from screwing with it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
well, i don't know about your phone or what else you have setup, but my phone didn't lag and it seemed to help, i currently have my evo 3d active so my photon just sits there, so i can give a good feedback of idle time, but i can tell you after switching the governor, it went down 1% in 2 hours, now i say that's an improvement, so when i get back home i'll really give you guys some feedback
P.S. with any phone i had that had a fully custom kernal, i always used conservative governor
Well, perhaps it's just the apps I have running then. As I said, when it's set to sleep, it works pretty well with the powersave mode, otherwise, doesn't seem to make any real difference. Guess it's different for everyone cause of the **** they're running on their phone.
mrinehart93 said:
The general consensus regarding over/underclocking when I had my HTC Hero was that overclocking would save battery because you could get what you wanted done faster.
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Click to collapse
You know, I've never bought into this argument. To me, it is like saying that if I drive 100 mph I will get there faster, so I use less gas....which we all know is not how it works.
Maybe the physics are different for processors then they are for engines, but I think there is probably a happy medium somewhere. And I have a feeling that the manufactures really take this into consideration when they develop the kernels and ROMs. However, I might be wrong.
This is by no means an effort to discourage your awesome work. Everyone gets different results, but stock always seems to have the best battery life for me once all the bloat is gone. However, custom kernels do perform better. That is the trade off, in my opinion.
my2cents said:
You know, I've never bought into this argument. To me, it is like saying that if I drive 100 mph I will get there faster, so I use less gas....which we all know is not how it works.
Maybe the physics are different for processors then they are for engines, but I think there is probably a happy medium somewhere. And I have a feeling that the manufactures really take this into consideration when they develop the kernels and ROMs. However, I might be wrong.
This is by no means an effort to discourage your awesome work. Everyone gets different results, but stock always seems to have the best battery life for me once all the bloat is gone. However, custom kernels do perform better. That is the trade off, in my opinion.
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Click to collapse
Lol honestly I never bought into it either. I was just posting was the other devs at the time said. Even using an OC kernel, I never overclocked my phone.
mrinehart93 said:
Lol honestly I never bought into it either. I was just posting was the other devs at the time said. Even using an OC kernel, I never overclocked my phone.
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Click to collapse
Interesting...I hadn't thought about using an OC kernel and underclocking it back to stock. I wonder what that does, if anything, to performance.
The other concern that I have is that overclocking typically means more heat, which means more battery use... Just figured I would throw that out there too.
well, the results are in, now granted i already had the photon of the charge for more then 24 hours, so at 1d 15hr 57m and 10s i'm at 48%, but from the time i started the cpu test, 1:30pm, it was at 68% so in 8 horus there was only a 20% drop while idle, i say that's a good score , you guys tell me otherwise
A2CKilla said:
well, the results are in, now granted i already had the photon of the charge for more then 24 hours, so at 1d 15hr 57m and 10s i'm at 48%, but from the time i started the cpu test, 1:30pm, it was at 68% so in 8 horus there was only a 20% drop while idle, i say that's a good score , you guys tell me otherwise
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Click to collapse
and just an update, in another 4 hours, it's only gone down 2%!!!!!! come on guys, these numbers can't lie, but remember this is idle feedback, i'll re-activate my photon at the end of the week (missing the beast!) to give more detail feedback on heavy usage and most importantly 4g!!
Development. Development. Development.
Sent from my MB855 using xda premium
Not sure if this will help but let me explain the car analogy. All motors have an effeciency range at x amount of throttle. So same cars will get better gas mileage at a higher speed vs a lower one. Its getting up to that speed where most energy is used.
So let me move this over to electronics. If you run a faster clock speed while on, your apps will open faster so that ia less on time for the screen and other processes that have to run. So using more watts for less time does not always equal more than using less watts for more time. We just need to fill in those blanks and obviously overclocking will not benefit the nook or internet reader as it eould someone who opens a lot of apps for short periods. Same is true for a gamer .
Hope that makes sense and this is all IMHO of course.
Sent from my MB855 using XDA App
scoobdude said:
Not sure if this will help but let me explain the car analogy. All motors have an effeciency range at x amount of throttle. So same cars will get better gas mileage at a higher speed vs a lower one. Its getting up to that speed where most energy is used.
So let me move this over to electronics. If you run a faster clock speed while on, your apps will open faster so that ia less on time for the screen and other processes that have to run. So using more watts for less time does not always equal more than using less watts for more time. We just need to fill in those blanks and obviously overclocking will not benefit the nook or internet reader as it eould someone who opens a lot of apps for short periods. Same is true for a gamer .
Hope that makes sense and this is all IMHO of course.
Sent from my MB855 using XDA App
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Click to collapse
Let me start this off by saying that I am an agricultural engineer by trade. With that said, I would agree that engines have an efficiency range. However, I would not agree that it is at x throttle. Rather, it is a x load. And most cars are designed to be at optimal load at about 60 mph (wind resist, weight, etc. play a role in this). You're right, it does require more fuel to get to that speed because the load is higher until that speed is reached. Furthermore, higher speeds (greater than 60 mph) do NOT translate into higher fuel mileages because the load increases to maintain the higher speed (because there is more wind resistance, among other things).
I know a bit about electricity too, but I don't fully understand the physics behind circuit boards. However, I think the analogy still holds. I can get to 60 mph as fast as I want, but the faster I do it the more energy is required. Therefore, even though it is done faster it still requires more energy, which also creates more heat, both of which use the battery. So, I continue to contend that there is a happy medium that most be found and I think electronic engineers aren't to far off.
Here is a little more reading about car efficiency, if you are interested: http://www.mpgforspeed.com/
I believe your confusing overclocking and overvolting. We are putting x volts into the processor so the more cycles we can get in x volts the better. If we have to overvolt to overclock then we see big battery hits.
Sent from my MB855 using Tapatalk
2cents, that link is interesting but real world examples have proven otherwise to me. Our saab will do better on mpg at 70 to 75 (30 on cruise control) vs 55 to 65(27 to 28 on cruise). Now the wrx is another story as well. With the old 3.9 final drive i would pull in more air at the airflow meter at 65 than i would at 70 with stoich as the target a/f ratio, and because that motor was doing under 2500 rpms the turbo was out of the equation further taking out efficiency with it. Now with the 4.44 and a better 1-2 gear ratio car gets better at the lower engine speeds and accelerates even better and that was before i retuned it.
Another misconception is bigger motors use more gas, one of the recent corvettes get 30 on the highway proving that there is more to this as well.
I think i have taken this off topic enoigh for now. But in general i think my formula still needs to be applied to see the results as a valid number to compare overclocking and underclocking to running stock.
Sent from my MB855 using XDA App
i'm surprised no one even thought of this topic, regardless if things are getting done "faster" you are overclocking the cpu, making it go faster then what it's suppose to, which makes it use more power i.e. more battery, every phone that i had when i overclocked it, the battery wouldn't last too long, even with my 3500mah OG evo, if i overclocked it, i couldn't get a whole day, so underclocking will have the same effect in a sense since the processor now has to work harder to do what it does at it's stock clocked speed, well, hope anything i said here makes any logical sense, but on another note, the photon has gone almost 3 days unplugged!!!
again it depends on how the overclock is achieved. In most cases overclock is achieved by dumping more electricity into the cpu this will impact battery life, however alot of chips these days can be overclocked at the same volts essentially upping the "MPG" or clocks per volt.
A2CKilla said:
i'm surprised no one even thought of this topic, regardless if things are getting done "faster" you are overclocking the cpu, making it go faster then what it's suppose to, which makes it use more power i.e. more battery, every phone that i had when i overclocked it, the battery wouldn't last too long, even with my 3500mah OG evo, if i overclocked it, i couldn't get a whole day, so underclocking will have the same effect in a sense since the processor now has to work harder to do what it does at it's stock clocked speed, well, hope anything i said here makes any logical sense, but on another note, the photon has gone almost 3 days unplugged!!!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I agree with this for the most part. When it comes to power the end result is watts, which is essentially equal to volts x amps. It is not perfect because of a power factor, but it is close. Therefore, if you lower the voltage, the amperage goes up because the same watts are required to run the processor. The inverse is also true. These processors have voltage ranges that they will safely run in, but in the end, they require the same energy (in watts) to function at a given load. Change one a little bit (the voltage for example) and the other (amperage) compensates. Change it a lot and it likely wont work. Again, this is how it works for your typical home appliances. For a circuit board, it might be a slightly different story, but I imagine the science does not change.
---------- Post added at 03:57 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:47 PM ----------
scoobdude said:
2cents, that link is interesting but real world examples have proven otherwise to me. Our saab will do better on mpg at 70 to 75 (30 on cruise control) vs 55 to 65(27 to 28 on cruise). Now the wrx is another story as well. With the old 3.9 final drive i would pull in more air at the airflow meter at 65 than i would at 70 with stoich as the target a/f ratio, and because that motor was doing under 2500 rpms the turbo was out of the equation further taking out efficiency with it. Now with the 4.44 and a better 1-2 gear ratio car gets better at the lower engine speeds and accelerates even better and that was before i retuned it.
Another misconception is bigger motors use more gas, one of the recent corvettes get 30 on the highway proving that there is more to this as well.
I think i have taken this off topic enoigh for now. But in general i think my formula still needs to be applied to see the results as a valid number to compare overclocking and underclocking to running stock.
Sent from my MB855 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You may be right. Perhaps Saab designed their fuel efficiency at 70 mph. It's possible because many speed limits are now at or near that, but in general, optimal fuel consumption is going to be at or near 60 mph. Obviously gear ratios and such play a huge role in fuel economy. It is like using a custom rom, typically your mods will make it perform better, but the best fuel economy or battery life will come with a stock like setup.
Sure a corvette can have HP and economy. There is a power to weight ratio and lots of aerodynamics involved, which again is designed at a specific speed. But there is no way that a dragster will have a good fuel efficiency. To my point, there is a balance...
I agree, we are off topic a little bit, but the conversation is interesting, nonetheless.
By the way, can a mod move this to general, please?
Hey, this is my first post here! **Edited for... uh... clarity and to add some information. Hopefully it's more readable now.
I found a way to control and manage the thermal throttling of the device.***
Modern smartphones create a lot of heat, and usually the casing of the device or the aluminum midframe chassis is used as a heatsink. Unlike a laptop, it does not have a cooling fan, so it must rely on the passive dissipation of heat through the casing of the device and the display panel to keep the CPU temperature down. On the Nexus 6P, there is decent thermal contact between the processor IC and the midframe. However, due to both the fact that the RAM is layered over top of the CPU and because the thermal contact is still not ideal, it is difficult to keep the CPU as cool as a computer implementation.
In order to reduce heat production and control the temperature of the device, the OEM implements thermal engine for Qualcomm MSM chipset in order to slow the frequency of the CPU and GPU cores down when the temperature is high.
Right now it is set to 50C throttling temperature, presumably so that the heat production does not cause the display panel to heat up to the touch, as at lower powers, the thermal mass of the aluminum frame plus passive dissipation will make case temperature increases not very noticeable. However, at 50C, the CPU will often throttle even at medium load, because the hardware does not make it easy to keep the temperature under that. This has been true for every phone I have worked with in the past and some are even worse at this.
Personally, I find that having a high (>45C) surface temperature is not a huge problem (You can decide that for yourself. if it is a problem for you, this won't help you. You can't change the power efficiency limit of the processor). In my use case, when I have a lot of applications open, especially Firefox in desktop mode, or 4-way Android M multitasking or something like that (or just typing to a lot of people in Facebook Messenger or something similar). I kinda use the thing like a computer so obviously it has extended periods of high CPU workload and the device starts to throttle back to something like 1344 or 960MHz or even lower.
Given this, what I want to do is change the CPU throttle temperature to a higher one. Generally, we don't need to worry about protecting the processor hardware because it has built in thermal shutdown/reset functions should something go wrong. It's at something like 110C, which sounds high, but as someone who uses a MacBook Pro, it is normal to see the CPU temperature that high! Intel generally throttles at a much higher temperature because they don't care about the actual temp of the heat sink, only that of the processor die.
In the past kernel I tried, there was an option to set up the thermal throttling temperature (God's Kernel). However, I switched to the AK kernel recently, due to its High Performance Audio feature. This kernel did not include support for this configuration.
I am running MH19Q Marshmallow stock.
I used File Explorer with root access to go to system/etc I think and there is a file called thermal_engine.conf or similar. If you edit it, you see there are a lot of values. Actually basically if you look around, there are a lot of temperature values in there seperated by the things they control. I would like to explain more, but I think it is better if you can open up your file and my file side by side and see for yourself what's different. The gist is that there's a table of values and a bunch of actions to take when they're hit, and of course, there are release temperatures, which are basically the lower hysterisis limit I think. The temperature values look like 44000 or 43000 by default, which means 44C and 33C (celcius)and I changed mine to 97000 (97 C)
Here you can find the content of the file. Type in the pastebin website, then put slash QYhi05rE.
I didnt keep my old file.... sorry about that... Perhaps someone can post it if they have it.
With stuff set to 97 C, the device heats up a lot more, obviously, but it's manageable. If you have something like Cinema 4K open for a long time, of course it will get to like 50C on the surface (That is quite unconfortable to put your hand on, but I'm okay with it). Hangouts video calling seems to be the worst and sometimes the battery will get higher than 50C and then stop charging. Given the design of the phone, by the time the battery gets too hot to be safe, the system will probably shutdown or restart, and you'll notice it LONG before anything becomes a problem.
Thanks for looking!
***Do this at your own risk, as with all root mods and tricks. Obviously this has the risk of breaking things or causing hardware to fail. High temperatures on BGA soldered chips have been observed to increase the failure rates, even in stuff like routers and TVs and other stuff that you don't generally think of as having thermal issues. My last phone (Note 5) kinda broke after a little while, although I'm not sure if me doing this caused it. (Appears to be display panel issue, but have not tested). All I know is that earlier that day I was outside filming on it and processing video, and that the area above the SoC got rather warm to the touch. Which should be read as "painfully hot" to most.
file removed? add disclaimer pls
LarryChendragon2099 said:
Hey, this is my first post here! **Edited for... uh... clarity and to add some information. Hopefully it's more readable now.
I found a way to control and manage the thermal throttling of the device.***
Modern smartphones create a lot of heat, and usually the casing of the device or the aluminum midframe chassis is used as a heatsink. Unlike a laptop, it does not have a cooling fan, so it must rely on the passive dissipation of heat through the casing of the device and the display panel to keep the CPU temperature down. On the Nexus 6P, there is decent thermal contact between the processor IC and the midframe. However, due to both the fact that the RAM is layered over top of the CPU and because the thermal contact is still not ideal, it is difficult to keep the CPU as cool as a computer implementation.
In order to reduce heat production and control the temperature of the device, the OEM implements thermal engine for Qualcomm MSM chipset in order to slow the frequency of the CPU and GPU cores down when the temperature is high.
Right now it is set to 50C throttling temperature, presumably so that the heat production does not cause the display panel to heat up to the touch, as at lower powers, the thermal mass of the aluminum frame plus passive dissipation will make case temperature increases not very noticeable. However, at 50C, the CPU will often throttle even at medium load, because the hardware does not make it easy to keep the temperature under that. This has been true for every phone I have worked with in the past and some are even worse at this.
Personally, I find that having a high (>45C) surface temperature is not a huge problem (You can decide that for yourself. if it is a problem for you, this won't help you. You can't change the power efficiency limit of the processor). In my use case, when I have a lot of applications open, especially Firefox in desktop mode, or 4-way Android M multitasking or something like that (or just typing to a lot of people in Facebook Messenger or something similar). I kinda use the thing like a computer so obviously it has extended periods of high CPU workload and the device starts to throttle back to something like 1344 or 960MHz or even lower.
Given this, what I want to do is change the CPU throttle temperature to a higher one. Generally, we don't need to worry about protecting the processor hardware because it has built in thermal shutdown/reset functions should something go wrong. It's at something like 110C, which sounds high, but as someone who uses a MacBook Pro, it is normal to see the CPU temperature that high! Intel generally throttles at a much higher temperature because they don't care about the actual temp of the heat sink, only that of the processor die.
In the past kernel I tried, there was an option to set up the thermal throttling temperature (God's Kernel). However, I switched to the AK kernel recently, due to its High Performance Audio feature. This kernel did not include support for this configuration.
I am running MH19Q Marshmallow stock.
I used File Explorer with root access to go to system/etc I think and there is a file called thermal_engine.conf or similar. If you edit it, you see there are a lot of values. Actually basically if you look around, there are a lot of temperature values in there seperated by the things they control. I would like to explain more, but I think it is better if you can open up your file and my file side by side and see for yourself what's different. The gist is that there's a table of values and a bunch of actions to take when they're hit, and of course, there are release temperatures, which are basically the lower hysterisis limit I think. The temperature values look like 44000 or 43000 by default, which means 44C and 33C (celcius)and I changed mine to 97000 (97 C)
Here you can find the content of the file. Type in the pastebin website, then put slash QYhi05rE.
I didnt keep my old file.... sorry about that... Perhaps someone can post it if they have it.
With stuff set to 97 C, the device heats up a lot more, obviously, but it's manageable. If you have something like Cinema 4K open for a long time, of course it will get to like 50C on the surface (That is quite unconfortable to put your hand on, but I'm okay with it). Hangouts video calling seems to be the worst and sometimes the battery will get higher than 50C and then stop charging. Given the design of the phone, by the time the battery gets too hot to be safe, the system will probably shutdown or restart, and you'll notice it LONG before anything becomes a problem.
Thanks for looking!
***Do this at your own risk, as with all root mods and tricks. Obviously this has the risk of breaking things or causing hardware to fail. High temperatures on BGA soldered chips have been observed to increase the failure rates, even in stuff like routers and TVs and other stuff that you don't generally think of as having thermal issues. My last phone (Note 5) kinda broke after a little while, although I'm not sure if me doing this caused it. (Appears to be display panel issue, but have not tested). All I know is that earlier that day I was outside filming on it and processing video, and that the area above the SoC got rather warm to the touch. Which should be read as "painfully hot" to most.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not new.
This has been around and discussed for a while.
I have been running a modified thermal-engine.conf since day one.
**YOU HAVE NOONE TO BLAME BUT YOURSELF IN THE CASE OF YOUR NEXUS TURNING INTO A NOTE 7 AND BLOWING UP, CATCHING FIRE OR MELTING OR ANY BAD THINGS THAT MIGHT HAPPEN, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED**
This is a much MUCH more extreme version of the original Xthermal Mod that i made for personal use on stock rooted 7.0 and will share it here just in case someone wants it. I highly recomend to use the original mod as it is much safer. The config is optimised for games that would normally stutter or lag because of throttling. It keeps the GPU clock high up to much higher temps and even keep it maxed when the cpu starts to throttle to leave more thermal headroom for the gpu to run. The first throttle step is at 58C, cpu drops to 1200mhz but the gpu stays at max clock, the second step is at 61C where the cpu drops to 760mhz and the gpu to 390mhz, the thermal shutdown is still the same as stock at 66C. I highly recomend, that you use a "open back" case like the one i made (pic attached) so the phone can still release as much heat as possible while you hold the case to keep it comfortable(it will get hot to the touch). I recomend you to not charge with the fastcharger while doing high stress things as i have no idea what might happen to the battery. The benchmark difference is not huge as the maximal clocks stay the same, but real world gameplay (i tested simpleplanes which always stuttered and lagged like hell, now runs smooth) will do much better. Side effect is also possible better long term multitasking as while the mod is not made with the intention of keeping cpu fast, it still raises the first throttle step even for the cpu by a lot.
++V2++
Even more power for longer, slightly higher cpu clock on first throttle step, much higher gpu clock on 2nd throttle step, all steps temperature limit even higher than before but the last step that shuts down the phone is left at stock levels.
Fantastic, now I can use my phone as a hand warmer in the winter.
Paradoxumical said:
Fantastic, now I can use my phone as a hand warmer in the winter.
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Lol
Paradoxumical said:
Fantastic, now I can use my phone as a hand warmer in the winter.
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yeah xD
Thread temporarily closed while under investigation for violation of Rule 12. Thank you for your patience.
Hello Axon 7 users, I just picked up one a couple of days ago. After finally figuring out the bootloader, bootstack and general stock experience I tested a little bit of gaming. I found that a basic game like Clash Royale heats the battery up to around 42°C already with low brightness and slow charging. A more intensive game like the new Knives Out runs only slightly hotter but it becomes apparent that CPU gets throttled soon after loading to 1036MHz across all cores causing lag.
It's disappointing so I tried to find how to modify the throttling. Using ZTE's Power Manager setting on performance or balanced doesn't seem to have a noticeable difference.I tried the only stock custom kernel AX7 but it's outdated on B32 and I find it randomly reboots regularly. The stock kernel itself allows some configuration, but the thermal settings in Kernel Adiutor don't reflect any charge.
A quick Google search brings up how LG V20 Snapdragon 820 users edit /system/etc/thermal-engine.conf to tweak the throttling levels. Their config is quite different but they mod big to 1824Mhz and let little scale itself.
I couldn't get thermal-engine.conf to use the thermal-engine-8996-perf.conf values by copying the values to it as it suggests inside. I tried renaming it with the -zte.conf ending as it suggests as well but that didn't work. After just renaming both the normal and perf conf files with a .bak ending, I've found better throttling performance. Big now throttles to 1632Mhz and little to 1324Mhz. As far as I can understand the files don't have charging rates inside, just GPU and CPU throttling.
However as expected the device heats up a few degrees more now. This now puts my battery up to 47°C in Knives Out under the same conditions. Charging is stopped at 45°C by the system so as previously mentioned it's unmodified.
I just wanted to check since I couldn't find it mentioned. Is everyone ok with gaming performance limited to 1036Mhz with the normal throttle? Also are my temperatures normal? I guess CPU doesn't seem that high reaching around 65°C, it's just that the battery has less than 20°C difference in intensive performance. I suppose it's a quirk of the heat pipe to battery as heatsink design. I just expected more from a metal unibody chassis and at least normal CPU gaming performance. I thought my Sony Z3 Compact design was bad for battery thermals, with the battery stacked behind the CPU board, sandwiched in insulating glass. But I didn't expect to see a phone to route a heatpipe directly to it's battery.
Anyway it is what it is. Follow this information if you want some better gaming performance at the cost of your battery cycle life. In my case I bought the Axon7 just as a separate media consumption device rather than a phone so I can live with the tradeoff. If battery gets bad enough before 2 years I'll consider using warranty at the loss of receiving their refurbished replacement. Manufacturer warranty's in fact cover batteries for 80% depletion.
I recommend the app DevCheck Pro for being able to monitor CPU, GPU, temperatures and other things overlayed. I think some others may do similar but they may not be updated for Big Little and are more instrusively overlayed.
Infy_AsiX said:
A quick Google search brings up how LG V20 Snapdragon 820 users edit /system/etc/thermal-engine.conf to tweak the throttling levels. Their config is quite different but they mod big to 1824Mhz and let little scale itself.
I couldn't get thermal-engine.conf to use the thermal-engine-8996-perf.conf values by copying the values to it as it suggests inside. I tried renaming it with the -zte.conf ending as it suggests as well but that didn't work. After just renaming both the normal and perf conf files with a .bak ending, I've found better throttling performance. Big now throttles to 1632Mhz and little to 1324Mhz. As far as I can understand the files don't have charging rates inside, just GPU and CPU throttling.
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I read half of that to be honest, but just one thing: To make things harder, ZTE added added a write protection on the system. To disable it you have to use a computer and connect your phone with ADB, then issue "adb reboot disemmcwp" (like DISable EMMC Write Protection). Otherwise all the changes that you made get undone after a reboot, and obviously you'd have to reboot after modifying that file
On LOS you can use BeastMode (even if your phone isn't an A2017U) which for me is the best friggin kernel I've used in performance terms. There you can change thermal limits
Infy_AsiX said:
Hello Axon 7 users, I just picked up one a couple of days ago. After finally figuring out the bootloader, bootstack and general stock experience I tested a little bit of gaming. I found that a basic game like Clash Royale heats the battery up to around 42°C already with low brightness and slow charging. A more intensive game like the new Knives Out runs only slightly hotter but it becomes apparent that CPU gets throttled soon after loading to 1036MHz across all cores causing lag.
It's disappointing so I tried to find how to modify the throttling. Using ZTE's Power Manager setting on performance or balanced doesn't seem to have a noticeable difference.I tried the only stock custom kernel AX7 but it's outdated on B32 and I find it randomly reboots regularly. The stock kernel itself allows some configuration, but the thermal settings in Kernel Adiutor don't reflect any charge.
A quick Google search brings up how LG V20 Snapdragon 820 users edit /system/etc/thermal-engine.conf to tweak the throttling levels. Their config is quite different but they mod big to 1824Mhz and let little scale itself.
I couldn't get thermal-engine.conf to use the thermal-engine-8996-perf.conf values by copying the values to it as it suggests inside. I tried renaming it with the -zte.conf ending as it suggests as well but that didn't work. After just renaming both the normal and perf conf files with a .bak ending, I've found better throttling performance. Big now throttles to 1632Mhz and little to 1324Mhz. As far as I can understand the files don't have charging rates inside, just GPU and CPU throttling.
However as expected the device heats up a few degrees more now. This now puts my battery up to 47°C in Knives Out under the same conditions. Charging is stopped at 45°C by the system so as previously mentioned it's unmodified.
I just wanted to check since I couldn't find it mentioned. Is everyone ok with gaming performance limited to 1036Mhz with the normal throttle? Also are my temperatures normal? I guess CPU doesn't seem that high reaching around 65°C, it's just that the battery has less than 20°C difference in intensive performance. I suppose it's a quirk of the heat pipe to battery as heatsink design. I just expected more from a metal unibody chassis and at least normal CPU gaming performance. I thought my Sony Z3 Compact design was bad for battery thermals, with the battery stacked behind the CPU board, sandwiched in insulating glass. But I didn't expect to see a phone to route a heatpipe directly to it's battery.
Anyway it is what it is. Follow this information if you want some better gaming performance at the cost of your battery cycle life. In my case I bought the Axon7 just as a separate media consumption device rather than a phone so I can live with the tradeoff. If battery gets bad enough before 2 years I'll consider using warranty at the loss of receiving their refurbished replacement. Manufacturer warranty's in fact cover batteries for 80% depletion.
I recommend the app DevCheck Pro for being able to monitor CPU, GPU, temperatures and other things overlayed. I think some others may do similar but they may not be updated for Big Little and are more instrusively overlayed.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have noticed the same performance many months ago.
I tried changing the thermal values with both ways through the conf file or a custom kernel but all implementations seem to be faulty as nothing changed.
In the end I gave up because I couldn't find a solution for this.
But I figured because my games clash of clans, ppsspp, gba emulators don't lag I din't care much.
If you find a solution let me/us know.
Or post the modded confs you're using as well if you can.
That's all from me.
I just renamed both the thermal-engine files with a .bak extension. I've also got ZTE's Power Manager frozen as the performance profiles there don't seem to do anything and I don't use it's other features. There's some kind of CPU GPU throttle still in place but it's much higher as previously mentioned,. After searching further I saw your discussion about /vendor/bin related throttle, maybe that's the fallback it's now on.
The device does get uncomfortably hot with a new demanding game at maximum settings. I wouldn't recommend doing this if you want to maintain your battery. However if you're interested I discovered the Ax7 allows defining a lower maximum battery voltage in another TL/DR post https://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=74746734&postcount=1353. To explain simply, it's possible to limit the voltage low for health and safety while keeping the device almost primarily powered by mains. Effectively the battery is at an optimum low voltage, practically idle but very hot. A little complicated sure, but worth it. Getting a Daydream V1 tomorrow to play with, this stuff will help with heat and performance a lot. If anyone wants my long winded explanation, give me a shout.
The CPU temp does jump around higher than 70. I'm tending to think that current powerful mobile processors aren't efficient enough for the physical body constraints of phones. Let alone poorly designed ones. The 820 is meant to be an improvement over the 810, wouldn't believe it by the throttle required and performance lost. The 835 is efficient enough apparently. From experience though I have my doubts on reviews and benchmarks to reflect real usage stress.
edit: Oh and disable VDD restriction in your kernel setting if you've set it to auto enable. That seems to be a switch for the aggressive throttle still available after mod.
Sent from my ZTE Axon 7 using XDA Labs
Infy_AsiX said:
I just renamed both the thermal-engine files with a .bak extension. I've also got ZTE's Power Manager frozen as the performance profiles there don't seem to do anything and I don't use it's other features. There's some kind of CPU GPU throttle still in place but it's much higher as previously mentioned,. After searching further I saw your discussion about /vendor/bin related throttle, maybe that's the fallback it's now on.
The device does get uncomfortably hot with a new demanding game at maximum settings. I wouldn't recommend doing this if you want to maintain your battery. However if you're interested I discovered the Ax7 allows defining a lower maximum battery voltage in another TL/DR post https://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=74746734&postcount=1353. To explain simply, it's possible to limit the voltage low for health and safety while keeping the device almost primarily powered by mains. Effectively the battery is at an optimum low voltage, practically idle but very hot. A little complicated sure, but worth it. Getting a Daydream V1 tomorrow to play with, this stuff will help with heat and performance a lot. If anyone wants my long winded explanation, give me a shout.
The CPU temp does jump around higher than 70. I'm tending to think that current powerful mobile processors aren't efficient enough for the physical body constraints of phones. Let alone poorly designed ones. The 820 is meant to be an improvement over the 810, wouldn't believe it by the throttle required and performance lost. The 835 is efficient enough apparently. From experience though I have my doubts on reviews and benchmarks to reflect real usage stress.
edit: Oh and disable VDD restriction in your kernel setting if you've set it to auto enable. That seems to be a switch for the aggressive throttle still available after mod.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's weird... what are the ambient temps where you live? Here it's anything between 20 and 30 degrees and mine never gets that hot, and it barely throttles. Of course you shouldn't game while charging, that WILL throttle the phone.
I have a big old CPU heatsink without a fan, and when I charge the phone at night I just put it upon the heatsink. It keeps the battery around the ambient temp, which I guess helps with battery degradation.
A nice app for monitoring the CPU is Trepn profiler, you can program it to show you anything like frequencies and temps on 2 separate graphs for example