Overclocking - Is it worth it?

[ipaq38vette]

I am planning to stream movies and TV to my 206mhz iPaq over WLAN. 206 is not fast enough and I want to overclock it to 223mhz. is this safe? Does this kill the battery?

[Pony99CA]

I am planning to stream movies and TV to my 206mhz iPaq over WLAN. 206 is not fast enough and I want to overclock it to 223mhz. is this safe? Does this kill the battery?
I'm not an overclocker (on anything), but I imagine it would drain your battery faster. One major feature of the XScale is to scale down the processor speed to conserve battery power. That implies that going from a lower speed to the rated speed would be decrease battery life, and that's in a chip designed for speed changes. If anything, a chip not designed for this would probably be worse.

In addition, I'd be worried about heat. Running the processor faster will generate more heat. I don't know how much, or whether you'll feel it, but I do know that one problem in laptops (and I assume PDAs) is heat dissipation.

Steve

[dMores]

i suppose with the 206MHz he means the "old" iPAQ with the ARM chip.

it'll definately drain your battery faster.

my opinion is: if you're not *really* afraid of frying your pda (which can always happen, though it's rare) then do it.
you decrease your PDA's lifespan, but if it's near the end of it's terms anyhow, why not maximize it's use.

I haven't overclocked any PDAs yet, but nearly all my previous desktops ran faster than they were intended, and i never had a problem.
(the maximum was 200->250MHz :))

[ipaq38vette]

How could it decrease my ipaqs life? And if it fried, is the ipaq totally dead or restorable via hard reset? one last question. How fast can a 206mhz arm chip be clocked to?

[sfjlittel]

The processor uses more power when you overclock.
I haven't heard any stories about fried ipaqs but the posibility is there.
The 206 MHz can be overclocked to 233 (i think)

[dMores]

if a cpu is operated at a faster speed than intended (i.e. tested by the manufacturer) it can gradually dissolve, i think it's called electron-migration.

this is what i meant by shortened lifespan. a cpu is designed to last for a certain number of years of operation.

of course you won't really notice if your cpu's time is reduced from 10 do 7 years, because in a year or two you'll have a new pda anyways :)

[felixdd]

I do it all the time on my J568. I notice no hardware issues nor increased heat. The only thing is slightly shorter battery life and slightly less stable OS (sometimes it freezes).

Shouldn't be a problem.

[Pony99CA]

I do it all the time on my J568. I notice no hardware issues nor increased heat. The only thing is slightly shorter battery life and slightly less stable OS (sometimes it freezes).

So if your Pocket PC doesn't require enough soft resets for your taste, overclocking is recommended. :-D

Steve

[Dermot81]

I keep my IPAQ 3950 overclocked from 400 to 472 ALL the time. I've noticed no ill effects, no crashes, no need to soft reset/hard reset nothing.

I definately notice a difference after overclocking my IPAQ. I can watch DivXs that previously were unplayable (too much stuttering). Everything feels faster and even the menus and windows seem to respond faster.

PDAs aren't like desktop, where there are so many other components that these days overclocking a P4/Athlon XP processor is almost pointless (except if you change the system bus speed). Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is, you can actually feel every 10 mhz increase in cpu speed on an IPAQ because the cpu runs everything.

I should note, I'm not sure how well the old ARM overclocks (which I think you have). And the utility that overclocks the 3900 also increases the bus speed which is the main bottleneck in the PDA giving very noticeable speed improvements, which I'm not sure is the case for the 3800 o/c utility.

It's worth a shot though. I don't believe that o/c will reduce a PDAs life, at least not enough to make me worry, since I usually upgrade my PDA once every 1.5-2 years.

[waxman]

how do i over clock a ipaq 3835?
:)

[Dermot81]

how do i over clock a ipaq 3835?
:)

http://www.jimmysoftware.com/Software/Overclock/

[maximus]

It's worth a shot though. I don't believe that o/c will reduce a PDAs life, at least not enough to make me worry, since I usually upgrade my PDA once every 1.5-2 years.

Well, suppose you got a chip that is defected during manufacturing (already shows neutron migration during fab assembly), hence the 'normal' lifespan for your chip is about 2-2.5 years ... overclocking will decrease it further down to 0.5-1 year ...

[animlmed]

So what are the ill effects of UNDER clocking the CPU.