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Recently, we looked at the new and
exciting HP IPAQ H1910 Pocket
PC. We were impressed with its small form factor, screen quality and
performance. Considering the device is not the fastest of the bunch, it
performed well in most of our tests. However, many were still
quite disappointed to see that HP did not pack this little guy with a next
generation Xscale processor at speeds of 300mhz or 400mhz. It was
just a matter of time before someone would find a way to overclock this
amazing Pocket PC. Today, we look at a utility called Clear Speed by
Revolutionary
Software Front. Clear Speed is a small utility that will allow
you to overclock the H1910's processor to 300mhz, giving you a 50% increase in
performance. Is this really possible? How exactly does it
work? I contacted Hayes Haugen of Revolutionary Software Front and
here's what he had to say..
"The
PXA250 has a variety of clocks in the system that are configurable and
interrelated. I just spent time to find the combo that gave the best
performance while being 100% stable. There are several faster combos
that appear stable but don't work under full load or are flaky with storage
cards. Clear Speed has been tested for weeks and was started before I
heard of anyone looking into the concept. "
Installation & Setup
Installation is fairly straightforward. We connected the H1910 to
our desktop and installed the tiny application in its default location.
Clear
Speed can be enabled/disabled on-the-fly without the need for a soft reset.
Once activated, you can continue to run at 300mhz until you manually disable
it.
Ok!
Now that we have overclocked the H1910, let's test its performance shall we?
We
noticed that larger Pocket PC applications such as Ewallet, Pocket Quick View
and Excel did load and run faster. While some have reported better
video performance, Its results are only slightly noticeable. Besides, as
stated in our review, the H1910 handles pocket movies quite well to begin
with.
To
really compare performance, we ran
VOBenchmark and compared the results to the scores from our review.
Results
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HP H1910 @ 200mhz |
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HP H1910 @ 300mhz |
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| CPU |
Floating Point: 6.33
Integer: 13.51 |
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Floating Point: 9.39
Integer: 19.89 |
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| Graphics |
Bitmaps
BitBlt: 38.88
StretchBlt: 0.60
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Filled
Ellipse: 2.14
Rectangle: 3.77
Rounded Rect: 1.66 |
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Bitmaps
BitBlt: 57.78
StretchBlt: 0.85
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Filled
Ellipse: 2.64
Rectangle: 5.55
Rounded Rect: 1.93 |
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| Memory |
Allocation: 6.40
Fill: 0.60
Move: 0.31 |
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Allocation: 9.43
Fill: 0.88
Move: 0.44 |
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The
results show quite an improvement in all tests.
Conclusion
Overall, we were quite pleased with the results. Clear Speed is an
active project and those who purchase the software can look forward to future
updates. Features such as underclocking (for improved battery life) are
currently being tested. At only $10, it's definitely worth the small
investment. The HP H1910 just got better!
Questions? Comments? Discuss them
here!
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