Develop Bugs

How to undervolt and get better battery life. Please post your results and how to.

Hey all, this is a thread I saw on different forum and think it is would be good for noobs like myself to benefit from. How to undervolt your CPU and also post your Galaxy Note 2 specific results. I have tried these next steps, and so far I'm doing okay (can't give an accurate results on battery life yet). Like I said (I'm not ashamed to say I'm a noob) but if others can throw their two cents in, we can all learn and this thread can be useful. The next part was cut and paste d from other forum. And I deleted the url for the kernel and root
Prerequisites:
1. Must be rooted and recommended kernel
2. Download and install System Tuner
3. Download and install Stability Test
Steps:
1. Open System Tuner and select CPU
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2. Drag the slider shown in the picture to overclock or underclock CPU. In this picture we are overclocking to 1.8ghz
3. Select Voltage at the top to get to CPU voltage settings.
4. Ok, here select the buttons as they are in the picture.
a. Select the Green circled button to save current stock default settings.
b. Select the Yellow circled button 4 times exactly to reduce the millivolts by 100.
Stability Testing:
Now we really should make sure that it can handle it under load right? :silly:
1. Open Stability Test and select CPU+GPU Stability Test.
2. Select Full Details - Proceed.
3. The app will now start stressing your cores. I waited until at least 10 cpu passes before quiting the app...
Cliffnotes:
-By default, your settings will revert back after you restart your phone. You can set them to load at boot, but don't do this unless your absolutely sure that they're stable!
Open System Tuner - CPU - Menu key - Settings - Active Tweaks - Reapply CPU Settings - On Boot Completed
-Whenever i tried to lower the mv more than 100 below stock at 1.8ghz, my phone rebooted
-I am in no way responsible for anything that might happen after performing the above, even if you start your sentence with the word "but"
-here's stock settings in case you need to revert
[/QUOTE]

This is an interesting project but I would think that the average user would not need this as battery life is pretty good. Speaking for myself, I am able to get through the whole day without any issues.
Of course there might be other reasons why someone would want to do this.
Doc

Thanks
Sent from my SGH-I777 using xda premium

DocEsq said:
This is an interesting project but I would think that the average user would not need this as battery life is pretty good. Speaking for myself, I am able to get through the whole day without any issues.
Of course there might be other reasons why someone would want to do this.
Doc
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
from what i've read, undervolting save very little battery time as the processors are pretty efficient anyways. i don't have actual numbers, but i'd guess you'd get a few extra minutes - which some may really need.
it's that freaking gargantuan screen that sucks the most juice. there used to be a mod to undervolt displays. they had it working on an OG galaxy tab. i never really seen it used anywhere else.

I have an international version of galaxy note 2. I'm currently using AllianceROM and Perseus kernel. And my stock voltage is way way higher than yours. Like 1400mV mine, 913mV yours. Can I undervolt my note 2 to same specifications like yours? Thanks.

This is interesting but setcpu when I had it on my last phone worked awesome and was very easy to use.
Sent from my Amazing Galaxy Note 2!

rjisanandres said:
I have an international version of galaxy note 2. I'm currently using AllianceROM and Perseus kernel. And my stock voltage is way way higher than yours. Like 1400mV mine, 913mV yours. Can I undervolt my note 2 to same specifications like yours? Thanks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You is 1400 mV on 200 MHz? It's probabky 1400 on 1.6 ghz.
Sent from my SCH-I535 using xda premium

I also have Perseus kernel overclocked but still have great battery life. Thanks for the tip though might try it and compare the difference just in case.

I agree with DocEsq.. It is interesting indeed, but is it really necessary?
Can you overclock it?

My note 2 seems to be charging forever after undervolting. I'm talking for about 6-7hrs charging time here. What seems to be the problem? I'm using Perseus kernel. TIA!
Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk 2

I once conducted a test with my evo3d. I basically ran an amp meter inline with the battery. Measuring the exact power consumption. I dont remember the exact specs, but undervolting and underclocking my phone compared to stock made a very minute difference in actual power consumption. A difference of about 8-15ma. This was during a CPU full load scenario for about 10 seconds. Even loading the CPU with the screen off to take as many variables out as possible it was very little difference. During normal operarion the power consumed was virtually identical.
So the 2 to 3% of the day (overall time) your phone is actually under HEAVY load, it won't make much difference. It did make a performance impact. So not much benefit, just reduced performance.
Now overclocking and/or overvolting did make a larger difference in consumption at high constant load.
Want to ACTUALLY make a large impact on your battery life? Make sure you don't have any apps preventing your phone from sleeping and run the absolute lowest screen brightness you can stand.
YMMV.
Sent from my Galaxy Note 2 using Tapatalk 2

The benefit I found from undervolting isn't better battery life, it's reduced heat which in heavy use provides better performance due to no cpu throttling. I'm running 1800mhz using less battery than 1600mhz and with same temps as stock. Very stable, been running this for a month now at least.

Action B said:
The benefit I found from undervolting isn't better battery life, it's reduced heat which in heavy use provides better performance due to no cpu throttling. I'm running 1800mhz using less battery than 1600mhz and with same temps as stock. Very stable, been running this for a month now at least.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What app did you use to undervolt?
Sent from my Amazing Galaxy Note 2!

yankees45us said:
What app did you use to undervolt?
Sent from my Amazing Galaxy Note 2!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm using the stweaks app that comes with perseus kernel.. I've undervolted quite a bit and I get better battery life.. Still not quite as good as I had stock, but definitely a lot better for being over clocked.. I just reduce each level to the level below it and run for a few to check stability and keep going from there.. So far I have had no trouble at all with undervolting.. Certainly nothing like I did with my elte.. Here's where I've been for almost a week as well as today's battery results so far with Pandora playing over 3 hours straight and moderate use..
Sent from my SPH-L900 using Tapatalk 2

Yeah, just to let you know that there certainly isn't a linear correlation between undervolting and underclocking and power usage. That might have been the case in simpler times, but with modern multi-core microprocessors, you might actually be decreasing battery life by screwing with your clock rate or voltage. Yes, the defaults err on the side of caution, but it's a whole lot of work for little to no gain.
For example, by reducing your phone's clock rate, you might actually be forcing your phone to be spending more time at load; thereby not allowing it to fallback to its sleep state. There is also something called the power wall, where an increase in operating frequency requires an exponential increase in power. However, the reverse is also true. It can be counter-intuitive to think of it this way, so a practical example is how on a 100 mile trip, a 25 mpg sedan saves 4 gallons of gasoline over a 12.5 mpg SUV. However, over the same distance a 50 mpg hybrid saves only 2 gallons over the 25 mpg car. By that same logic, a mythical 100 mpg vehicle would only save 1 gallon of fuel. It's the law of diminishing returns. Then of course, there are the stability issues that you should take into account.
There is a lot that happens behind the scenes regarding power management. Your phone is capable of intelligently scaling it's processors, voltages, and frequencies up or down all based on current and expected demand. There are people who spend a lot more time doing this for a living, and the idea that you can do it better is probably a falsehood. If you want MOAR POWER, by all means overclock/overvolt it (just don't fry it), but trying to get an extra couple minutes of run time is likely a waste of some hard work. It's the software that kills your battery, not the hardware.
Talking about computer architecture can be complicated and boring, but start with searches on "rise time" and "logic level transitions" if you want to want more background.

Action B said:
The benefit I found from undervolting isn't better battery life, it's reduced heat which in heavy use provides better performance due to no cpu throttling. I'm running 1800mhz using less battery than 1600mhz and with same temps as stock. Very stable, been running this for a month now at least.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Interesting... whenever I'm dling using a torrent client my phone gets a nasty fever and I've gotta set it down somewhere as it will literally make me sweat, lol. I do b there think I'll be undervolting just for that specific circumstance but that is a very interesting concept...
anishannayya said:
Yeah, just to let you know that there certainly isn't a linear correlation between undervolting and underclocking and power usage. That might have been the case in simpler times, but with modern multi-core microprocessors, you might actually be decreasing battery life by screwing with your clock rate or voltage. Yes, the defaults err on the side of caution, but it's a whole lot of work for little to no gain.
For example, by reducing your phone's clock rate, you might actually be forcing your phone to be spending more time at load; thereby not allowing it to fallback to its sleep state. There is also something called the power wall, where an increase in operating frequency requires an exponential increase in power. However, the reverse is also true. It can be counter-intuitive to think of it this way, so a practical example is how on a 100 mile trip, a 25 mpg sedan saves 4 gallons of gasoline over a 12.5 mpg SUV. However, over the same distance a 50 mpg hybrid saves only 2 gallons over the 25 mpg car. By that same logic, a mythical 100 mpg vehicle would only save 1 gallon of fuel. It's the law of diminishing returns. Then of course, there are the stability issues that you should take into account.
There is a lot that happens behind the scenes regarding power management. Your phone is capable of intelligently scaling it's processors, voltages, and frequencies up or down all based on current and expected demand. There are people who spend a lot more time doing this for a living, and the idea that you can do it better is probably a falsehood. If you want MOAR POWER, by all means overclock/overvolt it (just don't fry it), but trying to get an extra couple minutes of run time is likely a waste of some hard work. It's the software that kills your battery, not the hardware.
Talking about computer architecture can be complicated and boring, but start with searches on "rise time" and "logic level transitions" if you want to want more background.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Like the way you put that. Good analogies there it just seems like the other day that undervolting was the hip thing to do. Technology just moves at such a wonderful pace though. Just one little FYI though, since i do like you analogy i would like to point out that the law of diminishing returns actually refers to something else entirely. I know, I know, nitpicking, but it's just that everyone is always off the mark with that one and, well I guess I'm just an anal ahole (and an economics major, ,which I guess just overall makes me an a hole, ,lol)

If you have ever pulled apart a laptop and saw how much thermal paste the engineers at the factory "designed" for their to be on there, or seen the air/fuel ratio most cars roll off the lot with, or ever replaced an intake in a vehicle with a high performance unit I'm not sure you would feel the same way about you yourself not being to do a better job.
I get the point, and I believe often there is validity to that point, but sometime things just aren't that simple. This is where power gains come from in tuning a car (which i do). This is where efficiency is raised by removing restrictive components in a vehicle (intake, exhaust, etc) and where cooling performance is increased on a CPU with the proper application of a quality thermal paste.
Whenever time is money, and you are deciding between your bottom line and something that works and something that works as well as it can, shortcuts are made and corners are cut. Perhaps they could have spent another 200 hours for the team to absolutely optimize the processor for each device, but the cost would have been an additional $20,000 dollars. This is not always the case, but with processors I think it is. I will undervolt everytime and I do take objective measures for battery and I agree gains are relatively small. For cooling, I found the difference to be very significant at 1800, mhzI didn't check at 1600mhz, however. I can run a full Antutu benchmark as much as I want at room temperature and never exceed the throttling point (70 C if i remember correctly). Now, I am in no way saying these are facts, these are opinions, so I could be wrong of course.
Psychotic-Cerebellum said:
Interesting... whenever I'm dling using a torrent client my phone gets a nasty fever and I've gotta set it down somewhere as it will literally make me sweat, lol. I do b there think I'll be undervolting just for that specific circumstance but that is a very interesting concept...
Like the way you put that. Good analogies there it just seems like the other day that undervolting was the hip thing to do. Technology just moves at such a wonderful pace though. Just one little FYI though, since i do like you analogy i would like to point out that the law of diminishing returns actually refers to something else entirely. I know, I know, nitpicking, but it's just that everyone is always off the mark with that one and, well I guess I'm just an anal ahole (and an economics major, ,which I guess just overall makes me an a hole, ,lol)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

The TIM wasn't put on there by the engineers who designed the chips; they are put there by workers being paid next to nothing.
Your phone doesn't have a CPU, it doesn't even use thermal paste; it's usually just a rubber contact patch and passive heat dissipation. This actually brings another point where overclocking can sometimes reduce performance due to throttling by thermal constraints (why our phone has such a low GPU rate than what it is capable of in other phones with better thermal envelopes).
You aren't replacing the SoC, you are changing the software that determines how to set the voltage/clock multiplier. The car analogy isn't valid.
And I stand corrected regarding the Law of Diminishing Returns; never paid attention in macro-econ. I think was because my prof. was more interested in forcing his political ideology upon us than actually teaching the subject. :silly:
EDIT: Keep in mind, the engineers rarely get what they want. The product the consumer ends up getting is usually dictated through a collaboration of what the business and marketing teams want. The engineer might request a large cooler clamp with a perfectly lapped surface and a carbon-based TIM. In reality, the consumer gets a dinky fan with melt-on TIM and retention springs. Money talks.

anishannayya said:
The TIM wasn't put on there by the engineers who designed the chips; they are put there by workers being paid next to nothing.
Your phone doesn't have a CPU, it doesn't even use thermal paste; it's usually just a rubber contact patch and passive heat dissipation. This actually brings another point where overclocking can sometimes reduce performance due to throttling by thermal constraints (why our phone has such a low GPU rate than what it is capable of in other phones with better thermal envelopes).
You aren't replacing the SoC, you are changing the software that determines how to set the voltage/clock multiplier. The car analogy isn't valid.
And I stand corrected regarding the Law of Diminishing Returns; never paid attention in macro-econ. I think was because my prof. was more interested in forcing his political ideology upon us than actually teaching the subject. :silly:
EDIT: Keep in mind, the engineers rarely get what they want. The product the consumer ends up getting is usually dictated through a collaboration of what the business and marketing teams want. The engineer might request a large cooler clamp with a perfectly lapped surface and a carbon-based TIM. In reality, the consumer gets a dinky fan with melt-on TIM and retention springs. Money talks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
1. The voltages are set by an engineer, that is what I was referring to.
2. The CPU thing was an analogy as was the car. Not a direct comparison. The analogy is referring to how there is set fuel and timing tables just like there is set voltage tables, both might not be the most efficient from the factory, tweaking them can improve things. How is this completely not valid?

Slimkat Won't Turn On After Reboot

Slimkat won't turn on after reboot
I was running latest Slimkat (8/28) and rebooted the phone using the reboot menu option from holding the power button. It was plugged into a charger at the time.
A while later I noticed it still wasn't on. I tried pressing buttons, holding the power button for 30 sec., etc. The phone was a little warm before I did the reboot, not sure if that is part of the issue.
Has anyone had their phone unable to be turned on after a reboot? Any solutions?
Thanks in advance.
I can't post in the development forums yet, so forgive me if this post is in the wrong place.

A "little warm" during usage (watching videos / gaming) or charging is not unusual.
If you're using something like a TPU case, the heat from the back of the phone can't esacpe that quickly...
Running SlimKat for a week now, several reboots and complete power off. No problems.
What was your battery percentage when you started charging / at the time of the reboot?
Does it show the "charger icon" / battery percentage when you plug in the charger now or is there no reaction at all?
Discussions about custom ROM related issues are supposed to be in "General" or "Q&A / Help", so you chose the right place. (The development forum is meant for actual DEV material only)

Bingo Bronson said:
A "little warm" during usage (watching videos / gaming) or charging is not unusual.
If you're using something like a TPU case, the heat from the back of the phone can't esacpe that quickly...
Running SlimKat for a week now, several reboots and complete power off. No problems.
What was your battery percentage when you started charging / at the time of the reboot?
Does it show the "charger icon" / battery percentage when you plug in the charger now or is there no reaction at all?
Discussions about custom ROM related issues are supposed to be in "General" or "Q&A / Help", so you chose the right place. (The development forum is meant for actual DEV material only)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for the reply.
The phone is unresponsive when plugged into a charger. No battery logo, doesn't seem to be charging (no heat).
I just tried plugging it into my Windows PC, and device manager is saying:
"A request for the USB device descriptor failed."
No response plugging it into a mac.

timosaur said:
The phone is unresponsive when plugged into a charger. No battery logo, doesn't seem to be charging (no heat).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yikes. Faulty hardware, worst case scenario? But from what you described, quite likely...
Did you buy it from one of the big Ebay deals or directly from Amazon? I think it's time to contact "them".

Bingo Bronson said:
Yikes. Faulty hardware, worst case scenario? But from what you described, quite likely...
Did you buy it from one of the big Ebay deals or directly from Amazon? I think it's time to contact "them".
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
????????? The phone seems to have come back to life, after trying random chargers. The current charger started charging after maybe 30 minutes of no response.
The battery is charging from 0%. I know when the problem occurred yesterday, battery was nowhere close to 0. So the battery had to drain and reset somehow.
Thanks for all the help. I did buy from Amazon, and I'm within my return period... still on the fence if I should return or not.

timosaur said:
The phone seems to have come back to life, after trying random chargers.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Can you check the Amazon charger with a multimeter? Maybe he's responsible...
Let's see if it charges properly and also how fast the battery drains afterwards.

Bingo Bronson said:
Can you check the Amazon charger with a multimeter? Maybe he's responsible...
Let's see if it charges properly and also how fast the battery drains afterwards.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I was using a third party charger, I'll check when I get the chance. Not sure how to measure those tiny pins

timosaur said:
I was using a third party charger, I'll check when I get the chance. Not sure how to measure those tiny pins
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I had to go back to stock charger when running slimkat.
Bingo gave me something to think about though. How well do these phones handle high temps/how well do they cool down? I can count on one hand how many random reboots I've had. Strangely it hasn't occurred when playing high res video. But my case, which I really like, provides little to no ventilation (glass on front and back, plastic wrapped with thick rubber on the side). I'm reluctantly going to ask--should I find a case that at least opens up the back?
I'm having no issues aside from common bugs with the custom Roms. But I don't want to slowly cook this thing either. Anyone know about the heat sink we have?

timosaur said:
I'll check when I get the chance. Not sure how to measure those tiny pins
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's just me being nosy ^^ You could measure it directly from the USB port of the charger (the outer pins).
KLit75 said:
How well do these phones handle high temps/how well do they cool down? [...] But I don't want to slowly cook this thing either. Anyone know about the heat sink we have?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I remember that case, KLit75, I believe it was from the "clunky tank" series. The Snapdragon 800 starts throttling around 145.4 °F, iirc.
A case like this slows down the cool down process, no doubt, but a "naked" phone can get just as hot on the inside.
I guess there's a small advantage with a naked phone as long as the surrounding temperature is low enough to make a real difference and keeping it a bit cooler in the long run.
My default settings keep the CPU around 82 - 88 °F for things like browsing, maximum was 113 °F when playing videos for a longer time with MX Player (HW+ codec setting).
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Heat sink, M'Lady?
I think I will remove the back cover, rip out the NFC connector, apply some copper foil and drill some holes in the back (Homer Simpson style) for elite cooling results. :laugh:

@Bingo Bronson, above and beyond with the info! Many Thanks!!!

Follow up on CPU settings: (since this thread is getting slightly off the track already ^^)
Since we have to use the voltages (see pic below) provided by the Kernel, I guess I don't save much battery life with these settings, less heat most likely, since the max. freq. is limited the whole time and the Governor scales down faster.
But then, there's also this:
tech_head said:
Please don't confuse voltage with current.
The voltage at which a part runs does not equal power. Power (Watts) = V (voltage) x I (current).
Low voltage threshold processes are used for high performance and high voltage threshold processes are used for low power.
LVT processes have higher leakage and consume more power, not less than the HVT process.
You can draw no conclusion based on the operating voltage, except that the HPM will potentially have higher leakage and therefor a possible higher current draw with all things being equal. It also has a higher clock frequency potential.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Keeping the input boost freq. low may have a little impact on battery life when you have a lot of interaction with the screen, as in "much tapping ➜ much boost ➜ much CPU".
Even with the currently lowered settings, I get "only" 3 days battery life with mobile data enabled.
I will lower my max. freq. to the same as input boost freq., both set to 960 MHz @ 800 mV and see how it goes (with the CPU set this low, it might be even worse since it needs more time to compute a task ^^)
Yes, I'm aware that these settings only qualify for basic phone & messaging usage.

Bingo Bronson said:
That's just me being nosy ^^ You could measure it directly from the USB port of the charger (the outer pins).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Haha the charger that caused the issue is one of those direct to microusb chargers.. the ones without a USB port. Never trusting one of those again.
Bingo Bronson said:
I will lower my max. freq. to the same as input boost freq., both set to 960 MHz @ 800 mV and see how it goes (with the CPU set this low, it might be even worse since it needs more time to compute a task ^^)
Yes, I'm aware that these settings only qualify for basic phone & messaging usage.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
How did the 960 go? I've been running at a 1.5Ghz max and I've been happy with it running over a day. I can't find input boost in the app I'm using but would that explain why the CPU jumps over 1.5 sometimes?

timosaur said:
Haha the charger that caused the issue is one of those direct to microusb chargers.. the ones without a USB port. Never trusting one of those again.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yep, had a similar experience with one for my Raspberry Pi 2. It worked for ~ 3 hours, then the Pi didn't boot up. I bought a "good" charger with 5V / 2.4A, turns out he delivered 4,5x volts at best, s#it happens sometimes...
How did the 960 go? I've been running at a 1.5Ghz max and I've been happy with it running over a day...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's decent, right now 46% charge left since unplug, I had multiple longer calls yesterday and some more than ususal texting, needed to take some phots with flash...
Performance is enough for basic tasks. The "multicore power saving" is another thing...
I wonder if it uses less voltage, I guess the voltage indications are meant for "all cores active" but how much lower is the voltage with only 1 core active, if at all...
I can't find input boost in the app I'm using but would that explain why the CPU jumps over 1.5 sometimes?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, that explains it.
Input boost is usually set to max. freq. so that the CPU goes "full throttle" everytime the screen is tapped (for that fluid Android experience ^^).
Limiting it may have (some) benefits for "heavy tapping" users.
Side note: I flashed the SlimKat v2015/09/15 build at 95% charge.
Side side note: I started using the 960 MHz setting at around 78% charge.

Cooling mods [hardware]

Hi all!
I have been noticing that the tablet can get fairly hot where the CPU is, and under load it can reach fairly high temperatures - CPU prime got it up to over 90°C for me to the extent that I had to shut it down.
To be honest, it doesn't really impede normal usage, and normally it seems to reach slightly over 70°C under higher workloads. I suppose that's not unheard of for ARM devices and might not actually count as overheating. But after seeing this video on the Teclast X98 Pro and some other info on modding in tablets, I was still wondering if there'd be a way to improve the cooling on the Note 10.1 2014 to get lower average temperatures - potentially, that should also lead to more stable and fluid running under high loads, as there won't be any need for throttling, and it might also be good for the components to keep temps lower.
So I guess my main question is if anyone has undertaken anything of this sort for this or comparable tablets? @thebadwrench has recently posted a very useful guide about swapping the battery with a rare shot of the inside of the tablet: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=66124495&postcount=13
I was thinking what the most sensible way could be to improve cooling of the CPU, which should be the small shielded unit in the lower centre of the second picture. People seem to have had good results with copper, but it seems fairly crowded in there and it might be hard to get it installed without shortening anything.
Aside of the more practical question, I'd also be interested in the typical temperature that other people's tablet reaches and if you have any better apps than CPU prime to produce high CPU load - possibly one that shows CPU temperature at the same time as well? Currently, I'm having another app running to check CPU temp (CPU prime for some reason only shows the battery temp).
Looking forward to everyone's answers!
PS: @mods Not sure if this is the right section of the forum, feel free to move if you feel it fits better elsewhere.

AFAIK Microsoft intended to fit an innovative kind of heat sink into their Lumia 950 and finally produced a standard design w/o particular cooling devices due to difficulties.
I have no clue how anything could be done. Except replacing the back cover with something thicker, offering room for heatsinks, fans, peltier elements or such.
But the Note should at least have thermal throttling and emergency shutdown features, like all current phones, which will throttle within the first half minute under full load.

franzli said:
Hi all!
I have been noticing that the tablet can get fairly hot where the CPU is, and under load it can reach fairly high temperatures - CPU prime got it up to over 90°C for me to the extent that I had to shut it down.
To be honest, it doesn't really impede normal usage, and normally it seems to reach slightly over 70°C under higher workloads. I suppose that's not unheard of for ARM devices and might not actually count as overheating. But after seeing this video on the Teclast X98 Pro and some other info on modding in tablets, I was still wondering if there'd be a way to improve the cooling on the Note 10.1 2014 to get lower average temperatures - potentially, that should also lead to more stable and fluid running under high loads, as there won't be any need for throttling, and it might also be good for the components to keep temps lower.
So I guess my main question is if anyone has undertaken anything of this sort for this or comparable tablets? @thebadwrench has recently posted a very useful guide about swapping the battery with a rare shot of the inside of the tablet: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=66124495&postcount=13
I was thinking what the most sensible way could be to improve cooling of the CPU, which should be the small shielded unit in the lower centre of the second picture. People seem to have had good results with copper, but it seems fairly crowded in there and it might be hard to get it installed without shortening anything.
Aside of the more practical question, I'd also be interested in the typical temperature that other people's tablet reaches and if you have any better apps than CPU prime to produce high CPU load - possibly one that shows CPU temperature at the same time as well? Currently, I'm having another app running to check CPU temp (CPU prime for some reason only shows the battery temp).
Looking forward to everyone's answers!
PS: @mods Not sure if this is the right section of the forum, feel free to move if you feel it fits better elsewhere.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Similar temperatures are note uncommon in mine. One suggestion is to use a small desktop fan and aim it down at the tablet when your demanding alot from the cpu. I sometimes do that with mine and it actually brings the temperature down about 15 degrees. Its not a mod, but it does work

Thanks for your answers so far!
@lecorbusier yes, I suspect it has throttling, but in the interest of better running it would be nice to avoid throttling when possible. I'm not sure about the effect on battery life - throttling might be good in that a reduced frequency might need less energy, but running hot in the first place is probably bad for battery life.
In fact, part of my problem might stem from either the ROM or some apps I am running - Squid on temasek's CM13. Maybe I just never noticed this before, or didn't use squid so often, but I've noticed that the last couple of days CPU gets up to over 70°C at times with just some writing in squid. Not sure if this is normal, will probably post it in the CM13 thread. But my general idea/wish to improve cooling still stands independently of that.
Similar temperatures are note uncommon in mine. One suggestion is to use a small desktop fan and aim it down at the tablet when your demanding alot from the cpu. I sometimes do that with mine and it actually brings the temperature down about 15 degrees. Its not a mod, but it does work
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That sounds like an effective method (and I guess in a way one might call it a mod ). I'm thinking about something more portable, and hence passive though.
I will probably try opening up and having a look at the current cooling mechanism to see if adding a copper shim or a better silicone heat sink etc. might help things. Another consideration would be a modded case that contains some metal instead of plastic on the back side. That might help to take away some of the heat even though the plastic back of the device itself probably remains a poor heat conductor. Might be a complicated mod, but I'll see if I can come up with a way to do that. If/when I manage to get something done, or some new thoughts, I will advise here.
Any further input of course still very welcome!

Metal will disturb the various antennas.
A back cover replacement containing one or two fans, adding 1 to 2cms of thickness, and draining the battery with the fans while looking clumsy, thats the "best" solution I could imagine.
Or a back cover replacement containing one or two copper plates, cut and arranged in a way that the antennas aren't too handicapped. Probably you have to remove the various EMI shields to be able to establish direct contact between the chipset and the plates. That is, if the chips don't have contact with the shield plates.
I think this will be something never been done before, but probably after.
Like the battery mod for phones, where you solder one battery together with a second one and cut a hole in the back cover, that the now double-thick battery may fit. That's already been done.

Good point about the antennae, I hadn't thought about that! That also makes sense of the lack of metal cases (facepalm). Might still try modding a case with some metal in some spots at some points, but good to keep in mind how this might impact wifi and bluetooth.
My plan was to see if there'd be a chance to fit some slim copper plates in strategic position on top of the CPU inside the normal case. I'll have to open it up and see how much, if any, space there is - but will probably try this first on a Galaxy Tab S 8.4 that I rely on less for productivity (and that does actually get way to hot, to the point of self-shutdown). Whenever I find the time that is...
Will report when I get around to doing anything on the Note (and might open a topic at the Tab S forum in case I do try a mod there first).

I added a copper shim for cooling to my Galaxy Tab S (will put a more detailed post on that forum when I find some time), which seems to have helped to control temperatures somewhat better. I had two odd crashes, but had some before I did the mod, so am relatively confident that's a problem of the ROM rather than my mod.
Will probably try it on my Note as well soon and report here for anyone who might be interested.

Have modded my Note now, and am planning to post a more detailed description some time (won't have time before next month though). It had clearly improved temperatures and stability of my Tab S, but I'm not sure how much of a difference it made on the Note 10.1 2014 because I didn't measure the baseline temperatures before the mod right (used CPU Prime benchmark which seems to have general stability issues on the temasek ROM I'm using).
Currently, I have idle temperatures of around 30C, under normal use it would get to 40-50C, and under stress (app StabilityTest) it goes up to around 89/90C after 5min and to 92/93C after 10min.
I'd be quite interested in what temperatures other people get on their devices without any modification?

franzli said:
Have modded my Note now, and am planning to post a more detailed description some time (won't have time before next month though). It had clearly improved temperatures and stability of my Tab S, but I'm not sure how much of a difference it made on the Note 10.1 2014 because I didn't measure the baseline temperatures before the mod right (used CPU Prime benchmark which seems to have general stability issues on the temasek ROM I'm using).
Currently, I have idle temperatures of around 30C, under normal use it would get to 40-50C, and under stress (app StabilityTest) it goes up to around 89/90C after 5min and to 92/93C after 10min.
I'd be quite interested in what temperatures other people get on their devices without any modification?
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Click to collapse
Thanks for the update. I did some baseline checks for you, using the same StabilityTest app for consistancy purposes. I am also on temaseks build, cm13 more specifically. I run temaseks 12.1 build just as often as the cm13, so I will run the tests there as well. I revert back to my stock rooted kitkat rom about 1 or 2 days per week so I'll check the temps on that ROM as well.
So, at idle I'm a little warmer than you, hovering between 37C and 40C. Under normal use (like web browsing) I'm between 50C and no higher than 57C. Under stress (again, using same app) I was at 90C at 5 minutes and 91C after 10 minutes. So slightly warmer on low end, nearly identical on the big end. I have the samsung flip cover thats specifically made to fit the 2014 edition on mine, so that could account for my slightly warmer temps. Its worth noting that when gaming on a VERY cpu demanding game, I never reach anything above 78C. Its probably one of the top 10 most cpu demanding games on play store and BY FAR the most I ever demand from my CPU, consuming a whooping 1.5-2Gb of RAM at times.
I'll check the numbers on my other 2 normally used ROMs here in the next few hours and I'll post those results too :good:
On a side note, my galaxy s6 phone (completely stock, near new) averages nearly indentical cpu temps and after researching the matter on it, I found that those temps (on the s6) are what others are getting as well. So it seems that, generally speaking, samsungs might just run with warmer temperatures. I did see somewhere that 100C is kinda the 'YIKES!' point for them and that they start clocking down around that temp to prevent permanent damage

franzli said:
I'd be quite interested in what temperatures other people get on their devices without any modification?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ok, I've done some testing with a few different ROMs and I think you might be as susprised with the results as I am. First of all I need to correct myself in my last post. The initial testing I did was on temaseks unofficial CM12.1 build, not on the CM13 build. I have now tested on temaseks cm 12.1 and cm13 builds, my stock rooted & debloated 4.4.2 ROM and an old nandroid backup I have of hyperdrives 4.4.2 ROM. Heres what I found...
Temaseks CM13 build ran the hottest and was by far the most stressful on the processors and therefore ran the hottest. It consistantly kept the CPU clocked at near max (even when set to "ondemand"), whether needed or not (with no background process running) and would only reduce power when forced via CPU governor or was at the safety threshold for temperature, which I can now comfortably say is about 95C. Tablet was slightly warm to the touch at idle with a temperature of between 50C & 55C. Under moderate load temperature jumped very raidly to the mid 80C range and then would stay there pretty steadily. Under heavy load, CPU temp quickly peaked at 94C where while watching the CPU output, it was obvious the CPUs were going in & out of protection mode as they would drop to 1600MHz, then peak at 1900MHz, 1600MHz, 1900MHz & repeat this. I didnt let this go on for more than about 2 min before shutting down and allowing tablet to cool.
Next, I repeated tests on both touchwiz based kitkat ROMs I have backups for. 1 of them is stock, rooted, debloated and un"tweaked". The other is stock, rooted, debloated and tweaked. Both ran MUCH cooler, peaking at 80C & 82C. These were ocassional spikes and actually averaged around 75C when under heavy load. Now comes the good news...
I have identified a major contributor of excessive CPU temps. When testing on the touchwiz ROMs and observing CPU clocking in relation to CPU temps, I found that the governors are set lower in these touchwiz ROMs. They were a steady 1300MHz with the occasional 1600MHz spike. They averaged 55C to 63C under moderate load and when under heavy load never reached more than 82C.
So, I am now back on my long time daily driver, temaseks cm12. 1 build and I'm ditching the CM13 build entirely. At least for now. I have set my CPU governors down to 1300MHz and with heavy load for nearly 30 minutes (gaming) my CPU peaked at 85C. So my findings were that CM ROM has overclocked the CPUs excessively. They are set to 1900MHz, which has become obvious to me brings them right up to their temperature safety threshold, 95C. It seems Samsung clocked them at 1300MHz and allowed for occasional spikes above this point, keeping them at a maxium & slightly more reasonable 85C a full 10C cooler than their maximum safe operating temp.
I never expected I'd stumble on not only a source, but also that I've been utilizing the solution for months. I should add that governing the CPU lower has had absolutely no effect on performance. I regularly shut down 1 or 2 CPU cores as it is. I found that the tablet will run perfectly under normal use with only 2 cores. This reduces temperature and increases battery life. Sluthing can be so much fun sometimes, it was right in front of my face I just never put 2 & 2 together lol :good:

Thanks for your detailed comparison, that's very helpful indeed! In light of that, I think my mod has indeed given some improvement, as I don't reach over 90°C on CM13 until after 5-10 min, albeit with some throttling to 1700MHz after about 10min.
I've always had the impression that the current CM13 builds are a bit more CPU hungry and run warmer (possibly that triggered my thinking about a cooling mod in the first place), so it's very interesting to see that backed up experimentally! Interestingly, I've had mixed experiences with CM13, almost like two "modes" of running - sometimes, it runs pretty warm, roughly like you describe, but at other times it runs fairly normally around 30-40°C without problems. Haven't really figured out what the problem is and am having occasional instabilities/reboots as well, so I might actually also return to CM12.1 for the moment too.
While the higher CPU clocks (although 1.9GHz is the specified clock speed, but I get what you mean) may explain the heat and slightly better results in Geekbench I've been having with CM13, it's a bit odd that I still get the good result when the ROM is in the cool "mode" (it goes up to high 60s, mid 70s during Geekbench if memory serves well).
How do you set your governors? And have you been able to get the cores to switch on and off automatically as they do on some other devices? Or is this not implemented in the kernel or something?

franzli said:
Thanks for your detailed comparison, that's very helpful indeed! In light of that, I think my mod has indeed given some improvement, as I don't reach over 90°C on CM13 until after 5-10 min, albeit with some throttling to 1700MHz after about 10min.
I've always had the impression that the current CM13 builds are a bit more CPU hungry and run warmer (possibly that triggered my thinking about a cooling mod in the first place), so it's very interesting to see that backed up experimentally! Interestingly, I've had mixed experiences with CM13, almost like two "modes" of running - sometimes, it runs pretty warm, roughly like you describe, but at other times it runs fairly normally around 30-40°C without problems. Haven't really figured out what the problem is and am having occasional instabilities/reboots as well, so I might actually also return to CM12.1 for the moment too.
While the higher CPU clocks (although 1.9GHz is the specified clock speed, but I get what you mean) may explain the heat and slightly better results in Geekbench I've been having with CM13, it's a bit odd that I still get the good result when the ROM is in the cool "mode" (it goes up to high 60s, mid 70s during Geekbench if memory serves well).
How do you set your governors? And have you been able to get the cores to switch on and off automatically as they do on some other devices? Or is this not implemented in the kernel or something?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Your welcome. I too noticed that on CM13 at times it seems to run alot cooler than at other times. Although the only time I ever see go as low as 30C is when its been asleep for awhile and then I turn the screen on (CM12 & 13). As soon as it wakes up it'll go to mid-high 40C to mid 50C (on CM12) or it'll go straight to high 50C to low 60C (CM13). CM13 definitely ramped up alot quicker when testing, almost like its either min or max CPU power. I like temaseks CM13 build, but for me there wasnt much improvement over the CM12 build. Plus there is a few minor bugs as well as the slight negative effect on battery life I noticed. Plus I was noticing that there was a bit of a touchy spot in the top right corner of my screen that when swiped from the outside in, it sometimes crashed my tablet. I wasn't sure if it was a fault in my tablets hardware or something software related and I'm still not 100% positive which it may be, but since I began taking notice of when it was happening, its only ever happened on CM13. Thats also part of the reason I think I'm going to hold off on using the CM13 build for awhile. CM12 build is overall just more to my liking I guess... more to my tablets liking as well.
After posting yesterday I looked up some specs on Samsungs website and you are 100% correct about it being 1.9GHz. This is the spec copy/pasted off their website... Exynos® 5 Octa (1.9GHz Quadcore + 1.3 GHz Quadcore). The second part stands out because 1.3GHz is definitely where the stock rom was trying to maintain its CPU frequency when under heavy load. Not once did it exceed 1.6GHz. Whereas both CM builds ramped up to the full 1.9GHz very quickly. So the difference is going to be HOW the processor steps up in frequency as opposed to what the frequency actually is. Thats where my knowledge on that kinda stuff ends. I'm a "let's figure out what failed and why" or "lets figure out how it works" type of person. Thats why I work on cars for a living. I leave the development and detailed technical mumbo jumbo to the devs and engineers. Troubleshooting methods are much the same for just about everything though, hince how I came to my conclusion yesterday. Just for grins I may load up PAC ROMs CM12 build, see how it does. too...
As for how I set my governor, it depends on what I doing at the time. I never fine tune anything, like I said, that's outside my realm of knowledge. What I do set is the governor to either interactive or ondemand. Interactive more for casual use and ondemand more for gaming. I also manually shut down CPU cores depending on my demand from my CPU. Right now, for instance, I'm running stricly on cores 0 & 2 with cores 1 & 3 turned off. My CPU max clocking frequency is set to 1.3GHz but its consistantly hovering at 650MHz, or .65GHz. Thats all I ever mess with and I do so mainly for battery life. It makes a noticeable difference (both charging and discharging) if I adjust those 3 things according to my use. And no, my cores don't ever switch on or off automatically. I do vaguely recall seeing them do that on a different ROM, but I don't remember what ROM that was... it was at least a year ago that I saw that. I'm sure that is something that is kernel related, but I'm just guessing on that one.
What exactly did you mod? Any pictures?

thebadwrench said:
Your welcome. I too noticed that on CM13 at times it seems to run alot cooler than at other times. Although the only time I ever see go as low as 30C is when its been asleep for awhile and then I turn the screen on (CM12 & 13). As soon as it wakes up it'll go to mid-high 40C to mid 50C (on CM12) or it'll go straight to high 50C to low 60C (CM13). CM13 definitely ramped up alot quicker when testing, almost like its either min or max CPU power. I like temaseks CM13 build, but for me there wasnt much improvement over the CM12 build. Plus there is a few minor bugs as well as the slight negative effect on battery life I noticed. Plus I was noticing that there was a bit of a touchy spot in the top right corner of my screen that when swiped from the outside in, it sometimes crashed my tablet. I wasn't sure if it was a fault in my tablets hardware or something software related and I'm still not 100% positive which it may be, but since I began taking notice of when it was happening, its only ever happened on CM13. Thats also part of the reason I think I'm going to hold off on using the CM13 build for awhile. CM12 build is overall just more to my liking I guess... more to my tablets liking as well.
After posting yesterday I looked up some specs on Samsungs website and you are 100% correct about it being 1.9GHz. This is the spec copy/pasted off their website... Exynos® 5 Octa (1.9GHz Quadcore + 1.3 GHz Quadcore). The second part stands out because 1.3GHz is definitely where the stock rom was trying to maintain its CPU frequency when under heavy load. Not once did it exceed 1.6GHz. Whereas both CM builds ramped up to the full 1.9GHz very quickly. So the difference is going to be HOW the processor steps up in frequency as opposed to what the frequency actually is. Thats where my knowledge on that kinda stuff ends. I'm a "let's figure out what failed and why" or "lets figure out how it works" type of person. Thats why I work on cars for a living. I leave the development and detailed technical mumbo jumbo to the devs and engineers. Troubleshooting methods are much the same for just about everything though, hince how I came to my conclusion yesterday. Just for grins I may load up PAC ROMs CM12 build, see how it does. too...
As for how I set my governor, it depends on what I doing at the time. I never fine tune anything, like I said, that's outside my realm of knowledge. What I do set is the governor to either interactive or ondemand. Interactive more for casual use and ondemand more for gaming. I also manually shut down CPU cores depending on my demand from my CPU. Right now, for instance, I'm running stricly on cores 0 & 2 with cores 1 & 3 turned off. My CPU max clocking frequency is set to 1.3GHz but its consistantly hovering at 650MHz, or .65GHz. Thats all I ever mess with and I do so mainly for battery life. It makes a noticeable difference (both charging and discharging) if I adjust those 3 things according to my use. And no, my cores don't ever switch on or off automatically. I do vaguely recall seeing them do that on a different ROM, but I don't remember what ROM that was... it was at least a year ago that I saw that. I'm sure that is something that is kernel related, but I'm just guessing on that one.
What exactly did you mod? Any pictures?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi thebadwrench,
Which app did you use to do all this modifications on cm13 stock kernel? Especially deactivating cores is very interesting. Can you see all eight cores? I'm using 3C toolbox and it shows it only as quad core and on voltage page I have two cpu cluster.(one clocked till 650mhz and the other till 1900mhz)
Under CM13 the cpu behavior is totally different as on stock Samsung roms because the small cores are more or less unused and clocked at max. only at 650mhz, Lol!
I watch also much more kernel warnings in ksmg and high temperatures for a while now on CM13.
Also battery runtimes are only 3,5-5h unlike 7-8h under cm12.1!
Sometimes the cpu is also locked at max. speed(1,9ghz), mostly after looking youtube videos or other heavy load situations. The only way to get back "normal" behavior is to reboot the device.
I see also only two used cpu states all the time it jumps between 250 and 1900mhz, the most steps in between are unused.
We can only hope a real kernel developer can have a look on this or we can cherry pick some usefull tweaks from another device with the same cpu chipset.

ollimi1 said:
Hi thebadwrench,
Which app did you use to do all this modifications on cm13 stock kernel? Especially deactivating cores is very interesting. Can you see all eight cores? I'm using 3C toolbox and it shows it only as quad core and on voltage page I have two cpu cluster.(one clocked till 650mhz and the other till 1900mhz)
Under CM13 the cpu behavior is totally different as on stock Samsung roms because the small cores are more or less unused and clocked at max. only at 650mhz, Lol!
I watch also much more kernel warnings in ksmg and high temperatures for a while now on CM13.
Also battery runtimes are only 3,5-5h unlike 7-8h under cm12.1!
Sometimes the cpu is also locked at max. speed(1,9ghz), mostly after looking youtube videos or other heavy load situations. The only way to get back "normal" behavior is to reboot the device.
I see also only two used cpu states all the time it jumps between 250 and 1900mhz, the most steps in between are unused.
We can only hope a real kernel developer can have a look on this or we can cherry pick some usefull tweaks from another device with the same cpu chipset.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I use kernel adiutor https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.grarak.kerneladiutor It also shows 4 cores but shutting them down is just a single click. In the attached screenshot you can see that I've manually unchecked cores 1 & 2 and on the CPU display (turned on via developer options) you can see that those cores are indeed shut down and not operating. I like the app's widget, allows you to set up as many different profiles as you want and then change between the different profiles on the widget.

thebadwrench said:
I use kernel adiutor https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.grarak.kerneladiutor It also shows 4 cores but shutting them down is just a single click. In the attached screenshot you can see that I've manually unchecked cores 1 & 2 and on the CPU display (turned on via developer options) you can see that those cores are indeed shut down and not operating. I like the app's widget, allows you to set up as many different profiles as you want and then change between the different profiles on the widget.
View attachment 3732472
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah, good news!
I am positive surprised that kernel Adiutor is working, seems we have build-in UCI, which is needed, nice! Using KA on my OP2 since a long time but there is no custom kernel for p600 cm13 roms so I have not tried!
Will try it now!:good:
Thanks!!

thebadwrench said:
What exactly did you mod? Any pictures?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I replaced the silicone heat pad on the CPU with a copper shim and thermal compound, added some small silicone pads around other components (all under the heat shields) and added a .5mm silicone heat pad on top of the main heat shield to enhance contact with the back plate. I do have some pictures, but I want to provide a proper write-up and currently don't have much time as I'm moving. Will hopefully find a chance to give a more detailed write-up in May - sorry for the delay, but full report is forthcoming!
As for the CM13 issues, @joshndroid apparently implemented some changes to it in the last build, so I might check that out, although I agree that CM12.1 is probably still the safer bet for a stable daily driver.

franzli said:
Thanks for your detailed comparison, that's very helpful indeed! In light of that, I think my mod has indeed given some improvement, as I don't reach over 90°C on CM13 until after 5-10 min, albeit with some throttling to 1700MHz after about 10min.
I've always had the impression that the current CM13 builds are a bit more CPU hungry and run warmer (possibly that triggered my thinking about a cooling mod in the first place), so it's very interesting to see that backed up experimentally! Interestingly, I've had mixed experiences with CM13, almost like two "modes" of running - sometimes, it runs pretty warm, roughly like you describe, but at other times it runs fairly normally around 30-40°C without problems. Haven't really figured out what the problem is and am having occasional instabilities/reboots as well, so I might actually also return to CM12.1 for the moment too.
While the higher CPU clocks (although 1.9GHz is the specified clock speed, but I get what you mean) may explain the heat and slightly better results in Geekbench I've been having with CM13, it's a bit odd that I still get the good result when the ROM is in the cool "mode" (it goes up to high 60s, mid 70s during Geekbench if memory serves well).
How do you set your governors? And have you been able to get the cores to switch on and off automatically as they do on some other devices? Or is this not implemented in the kernel or something?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi Franzli,
The kernel seems odd to me!
The small A7 cluster is virtually unused and clocked only to 650MHz @ 1200ma !! Normal is 1.3GHz @ 1200ma for the small A7 cluster on 5420! Also a lot of warnings and errors in ksmg!
No idea whether the A7 ever used or permanently in idle mode, Lol!
Also all 4 big a15 cores are always online, what means no hotplug driver available!
I don't know if we will ever see a good kernel for CM13 because of the missing sources.
Although the kernel is running and mostly stable it is far from "good"!
Power consumption is almost doubled, problems with overheating and sometimes cpu is locked at max. speed and the only way to solve it is a reboot.
I don't remember the cm12.1 kernel but he was definately better in terms of battery runtimes and reliability.
BTW, I'll also mod the device cooling using bigger copper sheets instead of the perforated aluminum sheets, thermal-pads and thermal-grease when I start changing my battery and usb jack, what is definately neccessary in my case!
Maybe I will buy one of the small heatpipes used in S7 or so when I find them somewhere.
It is not difficult to adjust it if needed, so that it can replace the heatspreader.
Mabye it is needed to isolate the heatpipe from the mainboard but nothing what a piece of kapton tape not can do.

franzli said:
Hi all!
[...] But after seeing this video on the Teclast X98 Pro and some other info on modding in tablets, I was still wondering if there'd be a way to improve the cooling on the Note 10.1 2014 to get lower average temperatures [...]
So I guess my main question is if anyone has undertaken anything of this sort for this or comparable tablets? [...]
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hallo there
Well I just did the job. I have also made a short manual and would like to share it with you. But first some things about me and my tablet.
I bought a used galaxy note 10.1 2014 edition SM-P600 couple months ago. I was really disappointed about the device performance. Switching from stock android 5.1 to [ROM][7.1.2]Resurrection Remix N for SM-P600 (n1awifi) [5.8.5][UNOFFICIAL][NIGHTLY] did some improvements in performance. But since I am a very heavy web surfer I was still not satisfied with the performance. I have also tried [P600][Touchwiz] Marshmallow Rom 20170622 and went back to RR because I can play around with the CPU governors and all that deathy audiutor stuff. Between very nice work Exynos Team and all the other developers...
Soon I realized that the SM-P600 becomes fairly hot in the backside. I took a look at the ifixit pictures. There was no other way finding good resolution pictures of the inside.
I ended up installing cool tool app. Well is there any other good app for monitoring temps, clock and load in overly?
Well so I added frequency, load, battery temp and cpu temp. You need to add cpu temp manually. I guess it is Label ->
custom label -> enable- Then you have to go fine tuning -> custom label -> path:/sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp. leace everything as it is. regex is (\d+)\d{3} and add postfix °C and prefix cpu:
.
So I went along and analysed heat and temps in the galaxy 10.1 2014 edition. Especially frequency-temp-ratio. And I can tell you this buddy is everything else than cool. Temps jump up so fast I can't tell you. Even some fast scrolling on ebay, facebook desktop web page in browser treated the Temperature to the hight 80s and soon the high 90s. I have also seen the things franzli mentioned before. Even light work put so much heat to the processor. Watching the frequency and temperature bounce was a pain. I could feel the pain that little Exynos 5420 must suffer of all the time.Throttling is the only ways this little buddy can survive To make it short I decided to do the cooling mod...
So lets see what I found on my journey ... I can tell you that's a big surprise
I opened the case very easily. You can find tons of videos on youtube or use ifixit.
Well I have to mention I am an electronics hardware engineer. So doing this stuff is nothing unique for me. And I have years of professional PCB manufacturing, repair experience.
Opening the case, adding some tape and this is what you get...
As you can see there is a little thermal pad applied to the aluminium shielding. And boooom there you are . Do you see all thet flux solder remains? How come samsung? Seriously?
This is the shielding close up with that thermal pad.
As you can see the FBGA package is covered with flux from soldering. So it is naturally, that the cooling in the galaxy is a pain. There can't bee any good heat flow.
So let's check that thermal pad.
woops that little buddy is kinda to small. I am sad to see this.
Well I cleaned the surface as good as I can with ethanol. After this I applied a new Thermal pad.
After that it looked like this.
Then I closed the shielding case and cleaned it.
So next comes the actual cooling mod. I added a big thermal pad.
I had to cut that little hook in the back plate. So that the 100mmx100mm copper layer will fit in shape.
And this is it done.
So what about the results :laugh:
The back plate fits perfectly. If you know there is a thin layer of copper you can feel it. But it is so less. I had no problem closing the case. Ahh yeah I had to tage it with double sided tape, so it is pressed down to the thermal. The back plate will do the rest pressure.
And really don't worry about the wifi interference. There is no worry. Because the copper layer is located on top of the bettery pack and shielding case. Why should there be any interference? I have tried. Reaching same wifi performance as always. No worries:good:
So what about heating. Well my galaxy note stays pretty cool.
I need to mention this is all mesured with the [ROM][7.1.2]Resurrection Remix N for SM-P600 (n1awifi) [5.8.5][UNOFFICIAL][NIGHTLY] I mentioned before.
I used interactive governor.
I reach in Antutu v6.2.7 about 57000 to 58000
In futuremark work 2.0 I get 4000
Here some pics
I am sorry for that high resolution pics. But I wanted best of (bad) quality. I used my redmi note 4 for taking pictures. If you can't read all in the pics, just open in new window.
There isn't any more throttling at all. It is hard to push to 85°C or above now. Just with synthetic GPU and CPU load on all four cores at once. And it takes a couple of minutes. But in real world you will never get it. With only load on one core my maximum is 69 to 72°C. The tablet fells pretty nice now. The warming in the back plate is reduced to a very large surface. So sometimes it fells as if your hands warm up the case.
Can you suggest me any ROm with a good overclocking potential? I have already tried this ROM. I really don't know why, but it keeps crashing all the time at 2GHz or 2.1 GHz. Even with no load at all. I guess the used kernel is bad.
Do you have any ROM suggestion for me.
If you have any quastions and things you want me to test write me.
Just wanted to share my experience with you. I didn't expect a dirty PCB, BGA and thermal pad like this. So what do you think about this.

HTC 10 Thermal Throttling Thread

Hi there.
I have my 10 for a day now and it's my first HTC phone. Because I love overclocking and stuff I've already installed Qualcomm Trepn Profiler even though I don't even have root yet.
The SD820 is a Quadcore BigLittle with core 0 and core 1 maxing out at 1.59ghz while core 2 and 3 go to 2.15ghz.
So I've used my favorite app called stability test v2.7 and did a short run.
To be fair I've been using the phone the whole time with "normal usage" so it was already pretty warm.
But yeah, I don't know the SoC temperature, the phone itself didn't feel more like 40c.
And it dropped to 1.3ghz pretty fast. Normalised CPU load is about 70%
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So yeah. Any experiences outside from Benchmarking? I doubt that a 1.3ghz Kryo core will slow anything down if all 4 of them are working, but still. 1.3 instead of 2.15 +1.6 is a little difference.

That is unfortunate, I have seen many places mentioning how hot HTC 10 can get specially during gaming. It could be due to metal frame or maybe a software optimization issue.

@Haldi4803
thanks for this thread, can you please try the Powersaver and lets us know what changes in terms of cores configurations and CPU clocks
with the M8 HTC almost half the clocks with powersaver while keeping the core count and full GPU speed, with the M9 HTC locks into the small A53 quad cluster (which is a very bad idea considering how slow these cores are) on the X10 devices like M9+ and M9S HTC locks into quad as well and reduces the clocks to 1.2ghz turning the super smooth UI into a laggy experience
also whats the point of doing this test on an already warm device? its not really fair, can you please redo from a idle state?

This is expected. I remember the m9 had a lot of heat issues along with other devices that came with the SD810. Which is why a lot of devices went with the 808 last year. So they may have played it safe and went with more thermal throttling this year.
_ray_ said:
That is unfortunate, I have seen many places mentioning how hot HTC 10 can get specially during gaming. It could be due to metal frame or maybe a software optimization issue.
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Click to collapse
Actually aluminum sheds heat outward faster than plastic, glass or any other type of metal which is it's used to make engine blocks.

What do you expect from a metal slab, folks? I think these tests are silly. All they are saying is "if you pass current through metal slab, the metal slab is going to heat"...well, duh!!
As long as the phone does not shutdown during normal game play for an hour, I am fine with it throttling down to keep the temps under control. Can someone confirm that its fine to game for an hour on this phone and it still keeps functioning as a normal smartphone (calls, videos, audio, gps etc. function normally)?

devsk said:
What do you expect from a metal slab, folks? I think these tests are silly. All they are saying is "if you pass current through metal slab, the metal slab is going to heat"...well, duh!!
As long as the phone does not shutdown during normal game play for an hour, I am fine with it throttling down to keep the temps under control. Can someone confirm that its fine to game for an hour on this phone and it still keeps functioning as a normal smartphone (calls, videos, audio, gps etc. function normally)?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Indeed.
Also, go ahead and game for a couple of hours. Sure it throttles, doh, but it settles down rather quickly in regard to performance/temperature.
http://anandtech.com/show/10252/htc-10-battery-storage-results

hamdir said:
@Haldi4803
thanks for this thread, can you please try the Powersaver and lets us know what changes in terms of cores configurations and CPU clocks
with the M8 HTC almost half the clocks with powersaver while keeping the core count and full GPU speed, with the M9 HTC locks into the small A53 quad cluster (which is a very bad idea considering how slow these cores are) on the X10 devices like M9+ and M9S HTC locks into quad as well and reduces the clocks to 1.2ghz turning the super smooth UI into a laggy experience
also whats the point of doing this test on an already warm device? its not really fair, can you please redo from a idle state?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So your saying battery life wise,it's a bad idea to use power saver mode on the m9 but a good idea on the 10?
Sent from my 0PJA2 using Tapatalk

Heisenberg420 said:
This is expected. I remember the m9 had a lot of heat issues along with other devices that came with the SD810. Which is why a lot of devices went with the 808 last year. So they may have played it safe and went with more thermal throttling this year.
Actually aluminum sheds heat outward faster than plastic, glass or any other type of metal which is it's used to make engine blocks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is what lead me to run away from the M9 and Snapdragon 810. The 820 is probably nearly identical to that chipset design one would assume.
Only once we had kernel source and could under volt the CPUs, or turn some cores off did 1) the heat finally start to go away on the M9, and 2) the battery would stop being eaten up by the processor.
Would barely make it 8-10hrs on full battery on the M9. But what did turning off cores/undervolting do? Reduced performance of course. So, kind of defeats the purpose.
Sad to hear this. But I think this is going to be a trend and normal comment from people about the M10/Snapdragon 820.
Was wondering in the back of my head about the M10 and processor if anything has changed. Looks like it hasn't.

Lol, HTC Software sure doesn't like Benchmarking.
You can see the cores throttling 20sec after the Benchmark starts. But then when I tab out and it runs in the bg you can see the spike to 2.2ghz at the end.
Oh yeah, and for this test I did activate the high speed mode in Dev options.

what are the name of the app that are you using for the cpu/gpu onscreen overlay? thanks

@51CK0F1T4LL
Trepn Profiler, made by Qualcomm.
Sadly you have to switch to estimated Battery Power because normal mode doesn't work.

Did another test with powersafe mode on.
Sticks to 1,32ghz all the time.
Currently trying to find out if GPU Clock is also limited

Okay.....
I can totally see why the Adreno 530 GPU is throttling...
That thing draws an easy 7W on 624mhz and even after throttling still eats 5W on 500mhz.
P.S yeah, the result is that bad because of the resolution. It's not offscreen.

Nope,
Powersafe mode doesn't touch the GPU.

Lol.
You know this app? Boost+ with the Smartboost and game battery booster?
The only thing it does is reduce screen resolution from original 2560x1440 to 1920x1080.
Powerdrain is still exactly the same XD
Guess Benchmarks just aren't made for power efficiency XD

For cpu/gpu throttling try to do gfxbench battery test, or run the 3dmark test 5/10 times
I will appreciate if you can do this test for me

If you get 35-40 fps with good battery life this more than enough, unless you don't know what you want from you device.
I heard you can optimize the screen for 1080p for gaming, is that true

That's mainly GPU bound, so CPU will have about 10-20% Load maximum.
The Adreno 530 is not a little dragon but a huge power hungry beast. I think anandtech did a pretty good longtime throttling test.
P.S I get better Random Write in Powersafe mode..... Wtf?
And yeah, check the macro bench. CPU performance is reduced....
Battery safe:
Normal:

Regarding the random write: That's just AndroBench 4 being silly. The power saver doodah didn't do that.
If you want and care and bother, change your settings and runthe Micro benchmark multiple times, at least 5.
And then report the average of those results. (probably better to post that to the benchmark thread??)
When I tested my sister's Z3 Compact before/after FDE, I ran it 10 times.
Settings I used (default):
256MB file size (64MB) (feel free to increase this to 512 (or heck even 1024) if you want more accurate sequential numbers)
256KB/4KB buffer size (32768KB/4KB)
threads 1 (8)
Here's the raw data from my testing, notice the variation. Before FDE random write min/max
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VCT4hbJItyGaCrzJKfDvQG3f9uQ2B6grRl3VDWHik1M/edit
Which just goes to show how important it is to run the micro benchmark multiple times and then using the average, just like Joshua from Anandtech has said.
More info
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=66602020#post66602020
http://forum.xda-developers.com/htc...est-htc-10-t3364616/post66578426#post66578426

Ahhh right. I vaguely remember disliking androbench.
Now that explains why ^^

Does the OnePlus 3 get extremely hot to the touch?

Everywhere I looked they said that the OnePlus 3 has the least thermal throttling and best sustained performance of any phone out there. But nobody discussed why exactly it did not throttle while other phones did. Everyone simply said "Oh they must have very good thermal management or something". Then I saw a video comparing the temperatures of the ZTE axon 7 and the OnePlus 3 (google "Zte axon 7 vs OnePlus 3 antutu thermal throttling"), it turns out the reason the OnePlus 3 doesn't throttle isn't some magical thermal dissipation and management, it's solely because they raised the temperature at which the phone would throttle to beyond comfortable zones. In the video with just a few iterations of Antutu CPU test, the OnePlus 3 metal skin's temperature reached a scorching 47 degrees Celcius. Google shows that holding anything metal at 50 degrees Celcius for more than a brief moment can cause tissue damage (1st degree burns). And this phone was just shy of that temperature during Antutu's benchmarks when only the CPU was running, so can you imagine what temperatures it would reach when you're playing a highly graphical game where both CPU and GPU are being taxed at the same time? Why does nobody talk about this?

nothing to worry about IMO

Roykooiman said:
nothing to worry about IMO
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Click to collapse
Thank you for your useless opinion friend.

The only game i play on the one plus it's hearthstone but I don't notice an high temperature during session ... I think a benchmark it's one of the most stressful things you can do with your smartphone...
sent from my brain using a spell

nardustyle said:
The only game i play on the one plus it's hearthstone but I don't notice an high temperature during session ... I think a benchmark it's one of the most stressful things you can do with your smartphone...
sent from my brain using a spell
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No actually Hearthstone is not a demanding game at all, not even remotely. In fact an iphone 4 could run it without busting a sweat. And many games can actually be more stressful than a benchmark because you would be running both CPU and GPU at the same time and would likely be running the GPU at 100%. Most GPU benchmarks run the GPU at 100% too but without using the CPU at the same time.

A non issue imo
https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=CrK3C9VLuTg

ohyesman said:
A non issue imo
https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=CrK3C9VLuTg
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Click to collapse
I can't figure out why the hell that idiot in the video used real racing as a benchmark. Do these people even know what a GPU or CPU is?
Anyway, that video is not reliable, especially since the OnePlus 3 uses a 1080p display and has to push far less pixels than those other phones, that game does not tax the phone's hardware in any way shape or form.

The CPU starts throttling at 75°C like pretty much any other phone out there... This thing just dissipates heat better than any other Android phone out there which is why the chassis heats up a bit more. Don't worry it doesn't get that hot at all

crzykiller said:
This thing just dissipates heat better than any other Android phone out there which is why the chassis heats up a bit more. Don't worry it doesn't get that hot at all
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Click to collapse
Proof?

Pong Lenis said:
Proof?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The fact that there's a lot of us out here using the phone, but as far as I've seen zero reports of people getting burnt by hot phones, in. Y experience it stays way cooler to the touch than either of my last two phones (Xperia z2 and Samsung s3).