Overclocking to Save Battery ?

Question

Somebody was suggesting me this, to improve the performance of the battery overclock the phone to 900MHz, it will slow down the processor but will save quite a bit of battery.
My question is
is it true
How safe it is, will it cause any damage, working, functionality, features of the phone.
What side effect, negative effect can it have on the working of the phone.
inshort is it advisable ?

Answer 1

Sever wrote:
1. yes and no. it depends on how you choose to overclock it. if you use titan's kernel, which im pretty sure is the only way for pr1.2, you have the option to reduce the voltage as well as overclock. reducing voltage reduces the power consumption of the device (theoretically), and hence may improve battery life. in my case, the decrease in power consumption caused by the decrease in voltage offsets the increase in power consumption caused by increasing the frequency from 600mhz to 900mhz.
theres also the load aspect. if your processor runs at a lower clock speed, it puts more load on the processor to handle calculations compared to if the processor were running at a higher clock speed. ie. 30% load on a processor running at 900mhz would be equivalent to 90% load on a processor running at 300mhz. increasing load increases power consumption, however, as there is no way to measure the power consumption on these devices, its pure guesswork as to how the power consumption scales with loads. it could quite well be possible that the power consumption increased from running a higher clock speed could be offset by the decrease in power consumption caused by running significantly lower loads.
ie. my pc (phenom ii x4 965be, 8gig ram, dual radeon hd 5850 graphics cards) will only use about 100w of power when idling or running desktop stuff (cool and quiet disabled, ulps disabled, etc). however, when i run a game (full load on cpu and gpu), power consumption increases to 500w-ish. 
in the end, it all depends on how stable your n900 is when running the low voltage profiles. mine runs at 900mhz stable at the 'ideal' voltage profile, however, it crashes if i swap to the 'starving' profile. stability varies from device to device.
if all you want to do is improve the battery performance, you can skip the overclocking and just stick to the voltage adjustment.
2. there is always the risk of damage and detrimentally affecting the functionality of the device. these can be minimised by overclocking smartly, ie. overclocking in small jumps and then testing the stability using an application that runs high load. if any artifacting or speed loss or notable instability manifests, then youve gone too far. although in this case, i wouldnt recommend going above 800mhz unless you're willing to take the chance that you might brick your device. it may also shorten the life span of the device (assuming the cpu's lifespans is measured in clock cycles, as you increase the clock speed, it will go through the clock cycles much faster).
3. as in 2, you can brick your device, and cause significant damage. its possible that even nokia care will refuse to repair it as it was damaged due to negligence on behalf of the user.
its up to you whether you're willing to give it a go or not.
the only benefits are significant improvements in performance of the device and some improved battery life if you can get it to run on a lower voltage profile. for me, the performance improvements are worth it.
Hey @Sever you have given me some real Go Crazy information, I mean dont get me wrong I am not syaing it may not be correct I am saying it sounds pretty Mind Boggling,which has further confused me. I mean overclocking idea was suggested by someone.
I dont know if I want to do it atall or not. I dont want to fiddle with the Phone device and cause any complications.
I might aswell live like others who are facing this problem of battery getting drained faster in the N900. Then Regret it forever by tampering the phone.
Tell me from a Layman perspective, from a plain vanilla point of view. Going through this which is sounding pretty complicated activity and that too at a risk, does it all make sense to tamper with the phone by overclocking it. Or just leave it as it is. Maybe we may have a safe solution in the form of future firmware updates sometime in the future.
I dont know what to do ?