Well I got a new toy the other day, its an HTC Pocket PC (O2 XDA 2i) running Windows Mobile 2003 SE.

Its extremely cool, I have been playing Age Of Empires and Worms World Party all day and felt like tweaking it.

I did some searching around and found a neat little tool called XCPUScalar, which allows you to overclock and tweak your CPU, and a nice little benchmark application called SPB Benchmark.

Now the CPU runs at 520Mhz, and id read that that could be increased somewhat... so the first thing I did was ram it up as high as it would let me... here are the results.

The test subject:




CPU running at 520Mhz:





Benchmark running at 520Mhz:





Benchmarking complete:





Adjusting the CPU clock frequency (this is stock):





Whacking up the speeeeeed:





CPU running at 624Mhz:





Benchmarking Results



O2 XDA 2i @ 520Mhz

Main test results

Test	Time	Speed	% of iPAQ 3650* speed
Compress 1 MB file using ZIP	4485 ms	226 KB/sec	213%
Decompress 1024x768 JPEG file	387 ms	726 KB/sec	227%
Arkaball frames per second	9.06 ms	110 frames/sec	102%
CPU test: Whetstones MFLOPS	3864 ms	0.096 Mop/sec	208%
CPU test: Whetstones MOPS	898 ms	70.1 Mop/sec	206%
CPU test: Whetstones MWIPS	7929 ms	6.31 Mop/sec	212%
Memory test: copy 1 MB using memcpy	13.3 ms	75 MB/sec	107%

^*iPAQ 3650 running Pocket PC 2000


O2 XDA 2i @ 624Mhz

Main test results

Test	Time	Speed	% of iPAQ 3650* speed
Compress 1 MB file using ZIP	4248 ms	238 KB/sec	225%
Decompress 1024x768 JPEG file	334 ms	842 KB/sec	264%
Arkaball frames per second	8.91 ms	112 frames/sec	104%
CPU test: Whetstones MFLOPS	3225 ms	0.115 Mop/sec	250%
CPU test: Whetstones MOPS	745 ms	84.5 Mop/sec	248%
CPU test: Whetstones MWIPS	6593 ms	7.58 Mop/sec	255%
Memory test: copy 1 MB using memcpy	13.2 ms	76 MB/sec	108%

^*iPAQ 3650 running Pocket PC 2000



So as proved by the test results, the overclock was stable, and gave a small performance boost across the board.



However, cool as this may be, the downside is that overclocking the processor eats away more at your battery. Now when you're sitting on a train using WiFi as it is, you dont really want anything else hammering away at the battery, so I dont think ill be using the overclocked settings.



The upside is that the overclocking app can also scale down your processor speed, giving you more battery. When you just need a phone not to die for a while, im sure thats gonna come in usefull :-)


Now, back to more of this :-D





Thanks for reading.

Very interesting variation on the overclocking movement. Great post and excellent layout.

I certainly wouldn't have thought about overclocking a PDA (unless, perhaps, I pwned one myself ) but, you've definitely piqued my interest.


Please continue with any updates you may have along the way while using this "speedy" PDA.


-hartigan

What CPU's does that app support? Cause my phone has Windows Mobile and I think it has a Texas Instruments OMAP 850 195MHz CPU... It's an Orange SPV C600.

Nice mini-review, very interesting.

*EDIT* Woot, my phone's CPU is supported though I'm not sure if my handset is. Gonna try it anyway. I'll probably be underclocking though, for max battery. My phone lasts about 4 day's though I do use it alot.

Thanks for the compliments guys, concentrating on exams and revision at the mo but as soon as they're out of the way ill be tweaking some more :-)

Thats really a cool idea...What was the stock speed? I might have to try that with my Palm LifeDrive.......

Stock speed was 520Mhz. But as the name suggests, the Intel Xscales are capable of impressive overclocking (+performance) and downclocking (+battery life).

Do you know if that program works on Symbian?

Just thinking the battery life on my N73 is awful and this could be a neat little toy :-)


Mark

Sorry Mark, appears on to be for Pocket PCs.

Quote: Compatibility: XCPUScalar should work with most XSCALE or TI OMAP Pocket PC's on market. Minimum Windows mobile 2003 and XScale or TI OMAP processor PDA required.

Next step, get this thing folding