Razer Phone screen auto-dimming due to thermal profile; possible to change?

[Rumaea.Timbre]

Hello XDA community,

As I am sure a few of you have experienced, the Razer Phone will drop the maximum device brightness substantially as a result of even a moderate system temperature increase. For me, this occurs consistently after I am running any GPU intensive game for more than 5-10 minutes (CSR 2, Black Desert Mobile etc.)

Is it possible to change or turn off this function in any way? The maximum NITS of the device is not impressive to begin with. Having the brightness potential effectively cut in half whenever I run Youtube in HD is rather ridiculous. I have read conflicting reports that some users brightness potential will 'default' after a period of lite use, but this is not the case with my device. I am forced to restart the device entirely to regain its original maximum brightness capability.

Does this community have any thoughts on a potential fix? Are there many other users out there experiencing this problem as well?

 

[arnookie]

Yes same issue even when just watching video or YouTube. It drives me nuts. It's like brightness is turned down half way. It bloody awful and needs sorting. Would prefer the device to underclock rather than dim the screen. ?

 

[Rumaea.Timbre]

**UPDATE** Possible fix for this issue.

Good morning XDA,

I have been spending some free moments working on a solution to this problem and I may have found it.

I recently rooted my device and installed Kernel Auditor to edit my build.prop....KA also allows the modification of pretty much any value you can think of--this includes the enable/disable of thermal profiles. When I toggled off ALL thermal profiles I no longer experienced the screen dimming phenomenon--the negative byproduct of course is that your phone will turn into a hot pocket. More testing to follow, but for those that are rooted I would appreciate it if you could try and replicate my results!

tl;dr -- Kernal Auditor > Thermal category > disable all 3 thermal profiles > no screen dimming/phone turns to lava.

 

[arnookie]

No don't do it. Turning the throttling off completely will fry the main board and CPU / memory chips. Don't do it trust me I killed my last phone doing the same thing. It's the CPU that needs to throttle back not the screen brightness. Really don't understand why they would lower brightness rather than just throttle back the CPU.

 

[iliais347]

No don't do it. Turning the throttling off completely will fry the main board and CPU / memory chips. Don't do it trust me I killed my last phone doing the same thing. It's the CPU that needs to throttle back not the screen brightness. Really don't understand why they would lower brightness rather than just throttle back the CPU.

They do throttle the cpu but it takes enough heat.

The reasom the screen dimms is because of the heat pipe that is connected the back of the display. Disabling such mechanism might put the backlight LED to risk. But that seems less likely.

 

[Rumaea.Timbre]

They do throttle the cpu but it takes enough heat.

The reasom the screen dimms is because of the heat pipe that is connected the back of the display. Disabling such mechanism might put the backlight LED to risk. But that seems less likely.

Do you have a source for that information? I have seen from tear-down videos that the heatpipe is indeed attached to the back of the lcd panel, but I have not found any information on the specific mechanism of action that causes the thermal screen dimming.

Any information anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated.

-R

 

[iliais347]

Do you have a source for that information? I have seen from tear-down videos that the heatpipe is indeed attached to the back of the lcd panel, but I have not found any information on the specific mechanism of action that causes the thermal screen dimming.

Any information anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated.

-R

I do not have any source but i have seen other phones di the same thing due to heat. The LED might burn i guess but i do not see that likely.although that would such to have a half lit desplay.

 

[Leo2002]

The same thing happens to me!!

After 10 minutes of playing the screen looses a big amount of brightness!
I masst to restart the phone to make the screen to be at his full brightness!
This is annoying!! Is not like it is a cheap phone!
They should fixed this problem a while ago!
But they don't!!