Overclocking the N900
Hello everyone.
Today, I bring to you… How to overclock the Nokia N900! Since the first sighting of an overclocked Cortex-A8 processor has appeared, the folks at maemo.org have managed to flash the N900 with customized kernels in order to allow the CPU to be overclocked up to 1.2GHz (DSP up to 500MHz)! But due to liability concerns, only the kernel images of up to 930MHz have been posted.
Technically, the battery life would be less, but the N900 dynamically scales the CPU speed down to 250MHz when it is idle. The custom kernel allows it to go down to 125MHz.
Personally, I have flashed the 850MHz / 450MHz DSP kernel via XTerminal and the phone is definitely a lot snappier & responsive. So far, it’s been stable for me. As with any overclocking, you are on your own and accept the fact that you may cause hardware damage. In no way is anyone liable for such modifications. Period. You have been warned.
The kernels require N900 firmware PR1.1 or greater to run. However, since PR1.2 is coming soon, I highly recommend you restore the stock kernel before upgrading to the newest firmware or you may see some problems. As a side note, these customized kernel images were based off of PR1.1.1 and will almost definitely be incompatible with PR1.2. So once the new firmware has been released, WAIT for a new version of the custom kernels!
If you’re still interested, here’s a link to the guide that jakiman (thanks!) over @ maemo.org has put together: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=595582&postcount=774
Props to lehto and titan @ maemo.org for their work in creating these wonderful mods. I will update you guys if anything interesting shows up with the overclocking between now and PR1.2.