What is the consensus on overclocking the N900?

I'm not an avid overclocker. I'm not looking to make this thing fly. I'm thinking approximately 10% - 20%. What do you guys think? Do any of you configure your N900 to use overclocking full time?

If you do, how are you doing it (app/custom firmware?) and how much are you overclocking? Are you using variable settings? What effect on the battery have you observed?

I don't need a guide. I just want to hear opinion.

Thanks,

Abe

Overclocking with kernel-power49 and qcpufreq.
Loading ULV profile and clocking at 805 Mhz works very well for me.

On heavy usage the battery drains fast even at 600 Mhz, i get 3 - 6 hours heavier usage, feel no difference. But i think a 25% overclocked cpu should do the job faster when cpu processing power is needed, and thus eats a little more battery a shorter time.

Some handy programs are cpumem-applet (shows CPU and memory usage in small status-area icon) and conky or htop for deeper look whats going on, if a process eats to much cpu over long time.

If you don't want to heavy overclock (only up to 805 MHz) and want a good battery-lifetime you schould install Kernel-Power 49 and Karams Battery-Patch. This will enable some good power-saving options and overclock your phone to 805Mhz. And you don't have to configure anything by yourself.
If you want some more: with KP49 it is possible to overclock N900 to 900MHz with power-saving vdd1 and vdd2 enabled. For overclocking up to 1150MHz vdd1-powersaving has to be disabled.

Well, try kernel-power 49 (from extras-devel), it is rock stable on most of the devices using dsp profile (250-805 with SmartReflex on). And should give you above 50% more battery life compared to stock kernel (depends on the usage pattern, your mileage may vary)

I am using my n900 overclocked to 900 since March 2010, no problems so far. Since KP 49 has been out I am using dsp profile with limits 125-805, rock stable.

And don't use helper programs for overclocking, all of them are CPU/memory intensive and will drain your battery very fast. Read the wiki article on howto overclock (a little outdated but still valid in most of its part) if you find dsp profile is not stable for you.

Don't worry that kernel-power 49 is in extras-devel, there is an old bug in repos preventing it from entering testing and extras. Just enable extras-devel, install kernel-power and kernel-power-settings from there and disable it again, without updating stuff.


Anyway, don't seek consensus on overclocking, you won't find one here

@eight - I don't want to sound offensive, but judging from your join date, number of posts and software you are recommending I don't think you are the one to give advices on howto overclock n900.


EDIT:
and don't install Karam's stuff, it is also known as crappatch

Me, I don't overclock. I don't see any point to it, really. I'm not using my N900 as a gaming machine; I handbrake all my videos before loading them onto the phone; and I rarely need to have more than a couple of apps running at the same time. I find that when browsing the net, I'm usually limited much more by network speeds than by the phone's CPU.

I can see why Android phones might need mucho CPU power to sustain the horribly bloated UIs being forced on them by the telcos. But beyond the "oh cool, I've OC'd my phone!" factor, I'm not sure why you'd need to push the N900 up into the red...

Battery life is one reason( google for race-to-idle), HD recording/playback is one of the others.

I don't want to sound offensive
but what batterypatch do is just underclock your phone when its locked I think its better (I know im newer than eight and less post)
anyway why you think its crap??

@ freemangordon
I just wrote how i overclock. I have my device now 2 weeks and am in the beginning, but i have a linux background. Until now i did not spend days to test overclocking, ok.

But do you think the first some should do is setting up custom dsp?
If he never has overclocked, these programs are handy for a short view.
Qcpufreq can be removed very quickly if you want to go deeper.

I did some benchmarking with nbench which is handy for a stress test.

@ravent-n900

Karam's patches break things that shouldn't be broken, are extremely unclear in what they actually do and so on.

Just read the mega thread on this forum to see all the trouble people put themselves up with.

Yes, there are things you can do to speed up your device or get a longer battery life. Somehow they don't involve wearing a blindfold and praying the gods while knocking on wood at the same time. The word "research" comes to mind.

I really don't want to enter this discussion as it is OT here, but you can check on appropriate thread the amount of users having problems with it, it has a new version almost everyday, and that is not a good sign. I haven't seen any proof that it does anything good for battery life, it just uses precious RAM to keep DBUS listener alive. The battery saving is because of KP49 and SR support in it, not because of batterypatch, agree?

@eight - As i already wrote, I really don't want to be offensive commenting on your join date, peace .

But believe me, the short battery life you are experiencing is most probably a result of that status bar CPU/memory applet you are using, or some other crap you've installed, there is a lot of info about that here on TMO.

BTW you can try powertop someday to check what is causing it.