Well we have to remember that Nokia never designed the N900 to run above 600mhz, so any stability issues that may have become apparent when overclocking at 900mhz were never considered 'defective'. These issues only came to light when we started overclocking our devices and from this user testing, it was assumed that not all n900s are built 'equally'.

The general consensus is n900s that are “Made in Finland” are the golden devices because of the QC tests taken in Nokia factories. However there are now many convincing fakes and refurb units out there that state “made in Finland” on the boxes that work just as well. So finding a genuine Finnish N900 in 2015 will be quite rare.

With that said, other users with n900s that were “made in china” (in including myself) can overclock up to and over 1150mhz. I preferred a manual approach then adding a queenbee OC widget to the desktop. I would like to ask if smartreflex is the only method you have used?


And finally... The variants in the CPUs are most likely a manufacturing fault in the batch process, were they have found that a certain set of gates in the microprocessor do not open as they should when called for.

This is a very common problem in chipset manufacturing. Intel have this too, and are known for 'down grading' their production batches. For instance, when running a batch of Pentium4 processors and they find they do not run to full capacity for that very same issue, they will not throw them away. They will just put a Celeron sticker on them. For Nokia, they negated this issue by designing the n900 to be stable at 600mhz*.

I hope that answered many of your questions. If I am wrong anywhere, there are more knowledgeable folk around who will correct me. And I do admit, much of what I have said is from following 5yr old threads. Things may have moved on a lot since I last booted up my n900.

Edit: *600mhz at stable was still beastly specs in 2009.