Friday, July 16, 2010

Overclocking the MSM7200 / MSM7201a

After writing an overclocking tool for the HTC HD2 (Leo), I had a request from someone challenging me to overclock the HTC Touch Pro 2 (Rhodium). As I still have an HTC Touch Pro (Raphael) myself, with the same processor in it, I decided to give it a go. I quickly learned someone (bzo) managed to overclock the same processor on Linux already while working on their Android port to the MSM7k device series. Being able to use that code as some sort of limited documentation I've also written an overclock tool for a number of HTC MSM7k based devices, such as the Raphael, Rhodium, Diamond, Topaz, Blackstone and Whitestone. It's not working perfectly yet, though. For now it's only possible to overclock on AC power, except for the Rhodium which seems to overclock on battery as well. Read all about it in the thread on XDA.

Btw, the MSM7201a is a 528MHz processor. Some have reported to be able to clock it at 787MHz before it hangs. That's a pretty insane overclock if you tell me. For me it's stable at 710MHz. I can push it to 750MHz, but it'll lock up as soon as I do something heavier on the device, like watching a movie.