Sorry if this is a dumb question, but would it be possible to upgrade the PXA270 CPU in the Cxx00 from 416 MHz to one clocked at 520MHz? I have no idea if they are even the same size/pin capatable, but I thought I'd ask. I saw one cheaply here: http://cgi.ebay.com/INTEL-PXA270-520MHZ-AR...VQQcmdZViewItem

Since it's bga, have fun reballing...

If you dont understand what koen means when he says it is BGA and have fun reballing...

Look Here

Late

i dont mean to offend but have you considered overclocking, my c3000 can do 624Mhz easy and even a bit higher

BGA reballing is time comsuming and somthing that you really need to have at least smt soldering skills to pull off

I didn't know that it was difficult to replace the CPU. I know that you can overclock, but it would seem that power consumption would be lower with the CPU running at 520 by default.

I am also unsure of the effects of overclocking on the CPU. I don't want to damage my new hardware.

Not necessarily - design goals and physical limitations of the newer chip mean those figures could be anything. Measurement is the only way to determine the difference between the two.


I've seen many people on these forums worry about possible damage, but I've also seen many many people (including myself...) who overclock regularly with no problems. I have yet to hear of a single instance of a Z failing due to overclocking.

I *have* seen people brick their Z whilst trying to replace a chip in it however...

If the power consumption wasn't lower if the chip was clocked higher by default, wouldn't PDAs like the Axim x51v have terrible battery life?

You have to be careful in exactly what you are measuring. The mistake many people seem to make is that they think a CPU uses a fixed amount of power based on it's clock speed, when it is actually dependent on how much load it is under.

Standard PDA-type or computing tasks need very little CPU time to complete; the chip spends 99% of the time in an idle or halt state waiting for user input. When it's halted, it's essentially off and is using negligible power. And in these cases nobody bothers to overclock, as the CPU limits aren't being reached. Even mp3 playback is a low-load task these days. That's why even high-end PDA's still have reasonable battery life.

But people occasionally do cpu-intensive things on their Z's - movies, emulators, compilation etc. In these cases the CPU is running at or near 100% load instead of 2% - and the power usage increases accordingly. Since running at 100% isn't so great for realtime apps like mplayer people also turn the overclocking on at the same time... and then think it's the overclocking that's causing the lower battery life.

That clears it up a lot!

So if I'm starting with a full charge, and just use a text editor until the battery dies, I will get about the same battery life when running at 416MHz as at 624MHz?

All things being equal (initial charge level, backlight usage, etc) then yes, you shouldn't see a significant difference in runtime.

But since you can change the overclocking on the fly you shouldn't need to have it running at 624 at all if you're only doing the simple stuff

That was hypothetical. I wouldn't want to overclock just to use SciTE.

actually you would snotice a slight battery reduction (as i have found out when i forget to under clock) and it is noticable but it differs between OS's (wince seems to drain faster)