Replacement Prime came Overclocked!

[Blairware]

First, I KNEW the thread title would get your attention. Second, i hear 95% of you calling BS, and I would too. In fact, I am still not sure what to make of it, and it makes ME think the number I am getting is BS.

Here's the deal. Got my replacement Prime back from repair, and like more than a few (read the RMA thread) I was lucky enough to get a replacement instead of a repair. I had sent in my Prime, originally received on 1/3 (shipped on 12/23... GROUND, from Best Buy, though I had paid for overnight. Serial was: BCOKAS**5153

Sent if for repair mostly for a cosmetic issue, scratches on screen border, but I had among the worst GPS compared to others I have seen, no sats indoors, maybe 3-4 outside, never a lock. After the 1/19 update (the one that we still haven't seen a change-log for) I started getting reasonably crappy GPS, LOL as in 4-6 sats inside, and 9-12 Outside, occasional locks, but nothing usable. My Wifi was decent, actually quite good I would say. Bluetooth did not dropout when streaming to BT headset watching Netflix.

The support folks offered to open the replacement and test it before sending, and I said: **** yeah: Test everything: GPS, Wifi/BT check for stuck pixels, make sure the serial shows, also check for light bleed. I was promised they would do all these things. Then it was overnighted to me.... All in all I felt it was a reasonably GOOD RMA/support/repair experience, especially in light of the horror stories, and stories of general incompetence we have seen.

New unit arrived, looked cosmetically perfect. One spot on back, it was glue or tape adhesive from assembly no doubt. Screen appears perfect, with just the tiniest bit of light bleed. Wifi is decent, not outstanding, but close to what I had. No stuck pixels, have yet to test BT streaming. GPS? I got another dead one. I have yet to see a SINGLE FREAKING SATELLITE, Outdoors or in, though it's cloudy here today, LOL (If it's so bad that clouds kill it, it's pretty ****** up)

So that was a bummer. Yes, it's true I will probably not use it in the car (though I did use my OG that way once in a while, but I refuse to accept something that does not work. It is not in me to say: I can do without that.... even if I CAN, LOL. They are gonna get me another one, cause I am NOT RMA'ing this and going without it a week again... not for GPS anyway. If the WiFi was borked, it would be a different story.

One additional improvement. The power button on this one works correctly. I never knew how bad mine was, but compared to the 3 TF101's I had, it sucked. You never felt it bottom ot, or any detectable motion al all. It was just stiff and stuck, and I had to just press on it super hard to get any effect from it. The new one is perfect, the spring is stronger than the TF101 switches were, but at least it has a positive motion, with a solid detent, and you can tell when it hits bottom. Man, I can't believe how bad what I had was, and I had fully planned to live with it, LOL!

Okay so now for the weirdness. I am putting the new one through tests today, and among the, I ran Antutu. The numbers I got were nothing all that amazing, but the Processor speed threw me for a loop: 1600 Hz. WTF?????

Serial is C1OKAS**1793 I thought I was hallucinating. This thins is NOT ROOTED. I have NO performance tweaks, and nothing changed other than my 126 installed apps... How weird is this???

The numbers that I got were 10222, and a couple more in that range. This was running in Balanced mode. I switched it to Performance Mode (what used to be "normal" back in the Honeycomb days" ) rebooted, and ran Antutu again. Best number to date is 11089. Like I said, not up to par with folks that have REALLY overclocked, but somewhat better than my original... Anyone want to take a stab at explaining this to me? Maybe I am missing something super obvious?


Attached the Antutu result, and one other thing: The box sticker from a "C" serial number, for those who are curious: Check it: NO GPS LISTED!!!!I forgot to take a picture of my original box before RMA, screwed up there. Took dozens of the tablet to protect myself against claims of "CID" Customer Induced Damage, and forgot the box... grrrr.

GOOD NEWS: At least for the present the BOX LABEL still shows GPS. As many of us have discussed, as long as it SAYS GPS, we can still break chops to get them to fix it (or try to, I suppose) but what is with the question mark? Does anyone know the significance of that? That is kind of weird. I am pleased they left GPS spec on the box, expecially since I now have a completely dead GPS setup. I guess it's time to practice my Vulcan Nerve Pinch, but the few squeezes I gave it so far near the GPS Pogo Pins have been completely useless. Not a SINGLE SATELLITE HAS APPEARED YET.

An the Asus Support guy went on about how the Jan 19th patch was on this one. I said: as long as you see a few sats. send it along, He said (laughably) that it would get GPS performance as good as my TF101 did. Hmm. Well, to do that, it would need to start by getting ANY performance, LOL. Then it would need to work, in the car, with CoPilot live, all the way up the East Coast... Somehow, I don't see it happening. Sorry for the long post, but I was up late last night reading the huge tear down thread, and I had no energy for posting to a dozen separate threads today, on my latest "interesting" mix of features and performance with my new Prime. These feel like hand built devices.. every one is unique, LOL!

 

[clouds5]

Hmm i have a C serial too and my GPS is fine. Little worse than my dhd but fine.

 

[Lock-N-Load]

Get something like CPU Spy & see what it shows in the "unused cpu states" list at the bottom.

 

[Doktaphex]

It's not overclocked at all, since ICS the Prime has 1.5 and 1.6 ghz in the kernel, however, they are both disabled. This is the only reason we currently have over clock scripts, with root we can enable these settings.

Sent from my HTC Desire HD using xda premium

 

[tdrussell]

It's not overclocked at all, since ICS the Prime has 1.5 and 1.6 ghz in the kernel, however, they are both disabled. This is the only reason we currently have over clock scripts, with root we can enable these settings.

Sent from my HTC Desire HD using xda premium

thisssss

TF201 | XDA Premium

 

[AMoosa]

Antutu says mine is 1600 too.

 

[Lock-N-Load]

It's not overclocked at all, since ICS the Prime has 1.5 and 1.6 ghz in the kernel, however, they are both disabled. This is the only reason we currently have over clock scripts, with root we can enable these settings.

Sent from my HTC Desire HD using xda premium

This was what I was going to show with the cpu spy app

 

[Saguratus]

I just checked my prime, 1.6ghz with the latest update, no modifications.

 

[theandies]

^
Mine too
BCOKAS serial number

 

[rand4ll]

This was what I was going to show with the cpu spy app

Exactly. If you all use cpu spy like lock says you will see it never enters the 1.6 state. The processor has those steps built in but aren't enabled in the firmware

 

[demandarin]

People in here are funny..lmao. we already went thru this when ICS first dropped. All primes were showing 1.6ghz in the stats n benchmarks. But this isn't the case. WE KNOW THIS FOR A FACT. If you take CPU spy app n look it'll show the 1.5 n 1.6Ghz speeds disbled. MEANING YOU ARE NOT OVERCLOCKED. Only real overclock you can have is if your rooted and Running ViperControl mod or using SaturnDe ATP tweaks app or running script manually from directory /system/etc..

I was the first one to assume what all of you are saying also when ICS first came out. Then we dug in n researched further n found out this wasn't the case. It did lead us to a true overclock though since we knew it was in the kernel but just disabled. Me, I'm running a "TRUE" 1.6Ghz overclock using ATP tweaks app. Mines is confirmed through CPU spy. Plus my Antutu scores are well over 13,000. So 10,000 would be bad for an overclock like that if you really had one.

SORRY TO RAIN ON YALL PARADE BUT YOURE NOT OVERCLOCKED. Only through Root n methods I listed would you "Truely" be overclocked. CPU Spy will confirm your false claim. Don't feel bad, we thought so to at first when ICS first came out but quickly realized the real truth.

 

[Blairware]

No Biggie

People in here are funny..lmao. we already went thru this when ICS first dropped. All primes were showing 1.6ghz in the stats n benchmarks. But this isn't the case. WE KNOW THIS FOR A FACT. If you take CPU spy app n look it'll show the 1.5 n 1.6Ghz speeds disbled. MEANING YOU ARE NOT OVERCLOCKED. Only real overclock you can have is if your rooted and Running ViperControl mod or using SaturnDe ATP tweaks app or running script manually from directory /system/etc..

I was the first one to assume what all of you are saying also when ICS first came out. Then we dug in n researched further n found out this wasn't the case. It did lead us to a true overclock though since we knew it was in the kernel but just disabled. Me, I'm running a "TRUE" 1.6Ghz overclock using ATP tweaks app. Mines is confirmed through CPU spy. Plus my Antutu scores are well over 13,000. So 10,000 would be bad for an overclock like that if you really had one.

SORRY TO RAIN ON YALL PARADE BUT YOURE NOT OVERCLOCKED. Only through Root n methods I listed would you "Truely" be overclocked. CPU Spy will confirm your false claim. Don't feel bad, we thought so to at first when ICS first came out but quickly realized the real truth.

Uhm... No rain on MY parade. I think you misread my meaning I don't Have any great desire to overclock my ATP. Maybe later, for now I AM interested in the Kernel Module for Background I/O. Cranking up the processor does diddly when the Prime lags, and freezes every so often, especially under any type of background disk activity. 1.4 single. 1.3 ghz Multicore speeds are more than sufficient. People that overclock do so often for the wrong reasons. Why should I be cranking along at 1.6 ghz to browse a news article? If I had ultimate control I would like to control WHEN the additional core kick in, not how fast they tick along, doing a lot of nothing. I did miss your discovery that with ICS, it shows these rates. Right now I would give my right arm to know how, if you do all your posting with the prime, you deal with the cursor misbehavior in text boxes, like when it jumps to the first character position in the box, or insists on jumping to a spot and only the arrow keys will override that. And why is it "mines" do you have multiple Primes?

Edit: Also, I wasn't stating that "11, 089" was a enormous score, if you read I was stating that it was a BETTER score than my returned Prime, but not what I would expect if overclocked. I'm glad your numbers are so impressive. Maybe someday MY Prime will have a Antutu score of over 13,000! That's really fast! And that helps exactly how?

 

[rand4ll]

Also, since the processor has those steps built in it technically isn't overclocking to enable the 1.6GHz step. You are only overclocking when you go above that.

 

[demandarin]

Uhm... No rain on MY parade. I think you misread my meaning I don't Have any great desire to overclock my ATP. Maybe later, for now I AM interested in the Kernel Module for Background I/O. Cranking up the processor does diddly when the Prime lags, and freezes every so often, especially under any type of background disk activity. 1.4 single. 1.3 ghz Multicore speeds are more than sufficient. People that overclock do so often for the wrong reasons. Why should I be cranking along at 1.6 ghz to browse a news article? If I had ultimate control I would like to control WHEN the additional core kick in, not how fast they tick along, doing a lot of nothing. I did miss your discovery that with ICS, it shows these rates. Right now I would give my right arm to know how, if you do all your posting with the prime, you deal with the cursor misbehavior in text boxes, like when it jumps to the first character position in the box, or insists on jumping to a spot and only the arrow keys will override that. And why is it "mines" do you have multiple Primes?

Edit: Also, I wasn't stating that "11, 089" was a enormous score, if you read I was stating that it was a BETTER score than my returned Prime, but not what I would expect if overclocked. I'm glad your numbers are so impressive. Maybe someday MY Prime will have a Antutu score of over 13,000! That's really fast! And that helps exactly how?

You are correct. Stock speeds are more than sufficient for everyday usage. Overclock just makes everything even more faster n snappier. Web pages load up faster, apps open up faster, etc.. Its not for everyone. But for me its so easy to do and has no ill effects on my tablet. I'm like why not harness the extra power. Its in the kernel anyways and newer tegra3 tablets down the line will have exact same chip but the 1.6Ghz speeds enabled Stock. I do find myself going back to stock speeds alot because I truly appreciate how fast this device already is stock and ill get better battery life on stock. I do get pretty good battery life also on 1.6Ghz overclock.

Also, yes, I DO ALL MY POSTINGs, from the prime. I don't experience the major slowdowns or lags some seem to experience. Mostly only occurred sporadically in stock browser. I used ATP settings to change scheduler from noop(stock) to cfq. It seemed to help for a while but then came across an issue before, where I never had before, where the whole stock browser seemed to just freeze up or stop loading. Before it might freeze n then prompt come up saying to wait or close. After the switch it didn't do any of this. So i switched back to noop I/o scheduler n everything has been running great for me. I mainly just use the ATP tweaks app now for quick access to overclocking. Less steps needed vs. Having to go into terminal emulator and pulling up vipercontrol. With ATP all I do is open up the app n press Turbo2 n I'm overclocked. I did try out the deadline I/o scheduler also but didn't seem to make much of a difference. Actually acted kinda funny at times so i switched back to Noop. As Noop is the best out of all of them. Its just some people switch to other schedulers based on their needs for prime to PC file transfers n such. So its really a preference thing and what you experience with your personal usage and benefit the change makes for you.

AS far as bench scores go, I just said that cuz you mentioned yours n wanted to show another form of proof you weren't overclocked. Now for the cursor jumping around, I know what you mean..lol. but I use thumb keyboard, split mode, n very use to using the arrow keys to correct anything. Yeah the cursor does jump around at times but it still goes where you want most of the time through touching where u want it. Plus copying n pasting is very easy for me now that o got the technique down packed. So all of this is working pretty well for me and not a hassle at all as majority of my post count had been made with my prime alone. Before I got the prime, I was posting from my Ipad n Atrix4g. I can type very fast using thumb keyboard. Love it. Also, I only have one prime. The "mines" must've been a typo.

---------- Post added at 11:52 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:50 PM ----------

Also, since the processor has those steps built in it technically isn't overclocking to enable the 1.6GHz step. You are only overclocking when you go above that.

Yeah yeah..lmfao but we can't enable it stock. So its still "Technically" considered overclocked since it is higher than allowed out the box. Only if you running a "true" overclock using vipercontrol mod or ATP tweaks.

 

[jotka2]

 

[Blairware]

It's all good.

You are correct. Stock speeds are more than sufficient for everyday usage. Overclock just makes everything even more faster n snappier. Web pages load up faster, apps open up faster, etc.. Its not for everyone. But for me its so easy to do and has no ill effects on my tablet. I'm like why not harness the extra power. Its in the kernel anyways and newer tegra3 tablets down the line will have exact same chip but the 1.6Ghz speeds enabled Stock. I do find myself going back to stock speeds alot because I truly appreciate how fast this device already is stock and ill get better battery life on stock. I do get pretty good battery life also on 1.6Ghz overclock.

Also, yes, I DO ALL MY POSTINGs, from the prime. I don't experience the major slowdowns or lags some seem to experience. Mostly only occurred sporadically in stock browser. I used ATP settings to change scheduler from noop(stock) to cfq. It seemed to help for a while but then came across an issue before, where I never had before, where the whole stock browser seemed to just freeze up or stop loading. Before it might freeze n then prompt come up saying to wait or close. After the switch it didn't do any of this. So i switched back to noop I/o scheduler n everything has been running great for me. I mainly just use the ATP tweaks app now for quick access to overclocking. Less steps needed vs. Having to go into terminal emulator and pulling up vipercontrol. With ATP all I do is open up the app n press Turbo2 n I'm overclocked. I did try out the deadline I/o scheduler also but didn't seem to make much of a difference. Actually acted kinda funny at times so i switched back to Noop. As Noop is the best out of all of them. Its just some people switch to other schedulers based on their needs for prime to PC file transfers n such. So its really a preference thing and what you experience with your personal usage and benefit the change makes for you.

AS far as bench scores go, I just said that cuz you mentioned yours n wanted to show another form of proof you weren't overclocked. Now for the cursor jumping around, I know what you mean..lol. but I use thumb keyboard, split mode, n very use to using the arrow keys to correct anything. Yeah the cursor does jump around at times but it still goes where you want most of the time through touching where u want it. Plus copying n pasting is very easy for me now that o got the technique down packed. So all of this is working pretty well for me and not a hassle at all as majority of my post count had been made with my prime alone. Before I got the prime, I was posting from my Ipad n Atrix4g. I can type very fast using thumb keyboard. Love it. Also, I only have one prime. The "mines" must've been a typo.

---------- Post added at 11:52 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:50 PM ----------



Yeah yeah..lmfao but we can't enable it stock. So its still "Technically" considered overclocked since it is higher than allowed out the box. Only if you running a "true" overclock using vipercontrol mod or ATP tweaks.

I am glad that I am not alone with the cursor thing. A bit distracting, but for the most part I use the Hardware Keyboard in the dock when doing any serious typing. Like with my TF101 I like that the dock acts as a "stand" and a cover/case. and at home I tend to do a lot of wen/newsreader browsing, and posting, as you know.


I know you mentioned that battery life seems decent when running at full clock speed (okay, we know it's technically not "overclocked") so I say "full speed to avoid being corrected, LOL! I am curious about battery performance with it running at a true 1.6, and before you answer that it is not bad, can you say for certain, as in have you tested the discharge times with the Turbo2 enabled full time? Or, if you can at least say that it's not too bad, what would you peg the loss to be? 10% or more? I agree that if I had an app to easily toggle it on/off like the build in app that prioritizes processors, I would like to use it at times.. The built in one I think does the following:

Power Saving: Runs all Cores at reduced speed, I think its 600 MHz, 700 MHz when three are active, and 1 GHz when one or two are active

in "Balanced mode" - the cores are capped at 1.2 GHz

and in Performance Mode (used to be normal mod, just to keep it sounding exciting, they changed it to "Performance with ICS, LOL!) a single core runs at 1.4, or all 4 cores can run at full clip of 1.3

Not sure where they came up with these choices, but I will bet it was only after Nvidia ran them every which way, and came to these numbers as the best compromise of power and battery life. I think the Tegra 3 SOC also controls the video brightness and depth on the fly as well. All told a nice implementation. I still see lags occasionally, and games like Riptide GP freeze in a "Stutter Frame" kind of lock, till I exit to home screen, and resume the game, and it's good again.

Anyone else get that?

 

[demandarin]

I am glad that I am not alone with the cursor thing. A bit distracting, but for the most part I use the Hardware Keyboard in the dock when doing any serious typing. Like with my TF101 I like that the dock acts as a "stand" and a cover/case. and at home I tend to do a lot of wen/newsreader browsing, and posting, as you know.


I know you mentioned that battery life seems decent when running at full clock speed (okay, we know it's technically not "overclocked") so I say "full speed to avoid being corrected, LOL! I am curious about battery performance with it running at a true 1.6, and before you answer that it is not bad, can you say for certain, as in have you tested the discharge times with the Turbo2 enabled full time? Or, if you can at least say that it's not too bad, what would you peg the loss to be? 10% or more? I agree that if I had an app to easily toggle it on/off like the build in app that prioritizes processors, I would like to use it at times.. The built in one I think does the following:

Power Saving: Runs all Cores at reduced speed, I think its 600 MHz, 700 MHz when three are active, and 1 GHz when one or two are active

in "Balanced mode" - the cores are capped at 1.2 GHz

and in Performance Mode (used to be normal mod, just to keep it sounding exciting, they changed it to "Performance with ICS, LOL!) a single core runs at 1.4, or all 4 cores can run at full clip of 1.3

Not sure where they came up with these choices, but I will bet it was only after Nvidia ran them every which way, and came to these numbers as the best compromise of power and battery life. I think the Tegra 3 SOC also controls the video brightness and depth on the fly as well. All told a nice implementation. I still see lags occasionally, and games like Riptide GP freeze in a "Stutter Frame" kind of lock, till I exit to home screen, and resume the game, and it's good again.

Anyone else get that?

See I don't even have a dock n typed all that with no problem. Thumb keyboard makes typing so easy n fast on the prime. All I use is 2 thumbs to type n can do it very fast with the split keyboard mode.

AS for battery life if you ever ran the built in performance mode full time, then you will know it drains the fastest out of all modes because its running the higher speeds. Now with 1.6Ghz it drains about the same or a lil faster than performance mode. I've noticed lately I've been getting battery life even better than performance mode on my overclock. For the quick implementation of it that's easy. It can't get no easier then this. Check this out..lol. if you rooted, all you have to do is go into prime developement section. Go to ATP tweaks thread. Download and install ATP app into prime. Then open it. Allow superuser permissions. Then just press the Turbo2 tab n bam! Now you St 1.6Ghz overclock. The real one. You can use CPU spy to confirm that 1.6ghz speed is enabled.
hen if you want to disable it, just reboot tablet. Then whenever u want. All u have to do is open up that app n press turbo2 tab. There's a turbo1 also n that's for 1.5Ghz.. There is a step to do a more hardcore overclock to where you can run ALL 4 CORES @1.6GHZ at the same time all the time. Of course this burns up the battery the fastest. I doubt u ready for that yet though... lmfao just take it slow..lol use the regular overclocks. Get ATP tweaks app in developement section.

For the games, I don't have no stutters or freezes even on stock speeds.