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Nexus 9 is pretty after i flashed roms and kernels
HOWEVER
Thermal throttling is still an issue for tegra
while playing real racing 3, it keeps lowering the cpu frequency and make the game so laggy
Which seriously ruins user experience
thermal throttling starts at a frigging 50 degree celcius!!!!!!
Anyone has an idea to fix that?
I have been tried working on /d/tegra_throttle but it's not really working
Hope to be fixed through disabling it or raising up the threshold temperature (i.e. 80C)
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.
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.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
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
What does Chrysalis Thermals do? Cause I always see this.
Does this boost performance? battery?
it adjust the phone throttle to a bit higher,,,
i mean,, normally,, without one,, when you're doing something on your phone,,, and it hits about,, lets say 40 deg C,, then it will slow down so as to prevent it from heating too much,, but doing so,, sacrifices performances and you may easily notice a bit lags and slower framerates..
now,, with that thermal module script,, it allows your phone to perform at its maximum capability for a longer period of time even if it hits a certain higher value of TEMPERATURE,,, at the expense of heating,,
santiagoruel13 said:
it adjust the phone throttle to a bit higher,,,
i mean,, normally,, without one,, when you're doing something on your phone,,, and it hits about,, lets say 40 deg C,, then it will slow down so as to prevent it from heating too much,, but doing so,, sacrifices performances and you may easily notice a bit lags and slower framerates..
now,, with that thermal module script,, it allows your phone to perform at its maximum capability for a longer period of time even if it hits a certain higher value of TEMPERATURE,,, at the expense of heating,,
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks, how about this?
It removes ALL thermal-engine related files in your ROM, thus removing almost all of the thermal restrictions put on CPU, resulting in less thermal throttling, performance is better as well. The phone would got warmer and batterylife would suffer if you have too much running all the time, of course
The GPU rendering module just disable software rendering the UI via the CPU, nothing major
Rog phones are made for hardcore gaming. With its beefy thermal system, overclocked processor, hardcore tuning and so on. But to get sustained performance, the heat from the overclocked Snapdragon processor should be removed as they are generated.
The thermal paste applied on the processor can loose its properties over time and this situation put a lot of thermal stress to the SOC.
There are two way to solve this.
1) Replacing the thermal paste might work (If you go to service center Asus could brand the motherboard as faulty and might ask you hefty price to replace the board)
[What if, there is not a ton of heat generated from the soc in the first place?]
2) With the app, it is possible to reduce the heat generated in the first place.
when we run the apps which are not optimized the cpu, those apps tend to run the cpu at max clock speeds. This will heat up the processor much faster and eventually phone will shut down to cool down the cpu. If the cpu is too hot, the phone will undergo multiple shutdowns to keep the cpu temperature within working limits.
So with the app [root needed] which can be found here (Google drive), can monitor the temperature and dynamically sets the lower max frequencies to the cpu and gpu. By applying lower max clocks, (no need to worry as it wont interfere with the base clock speed or maintain a clock speed) the cpu would only need fraction of power to run. This will impact the performance upto 20-35%. But it may improve the battery life when gaming and solve the shutdown issue unless there is actual motherboard fault.
The app is only meant to be used with ASUS ROG 2 (SD 855+ variant). So dont try to use this app in any other device.
More details can be found in telegram group.
This issue is due to power management ic failure. When all cpu and gpu are running at max clock for few seconds, it draws ton of power from battery. Due to power management ic failure, when huge load of power is drawn the ic heats up at higher pace and ultimately a thermal safety measure is shutting down the device.
The above method may not work for all rooted users because there are more than one power management ICs are used inside our device. Anything could have caused this issue.
To prevent this issue:
Don't use the charging device when there is no cooling (use ceiling fan or table fan)
Don't use apps like gcam and camcorder when charging (those are resource intense)
Properly cooldown the device when playing high fps games.
Just sufficient amount of airflow is enough to convert heat from front display
any update on this issue