[Galaxy Note 3 General] Makshow:
Tuning Battery Life on Samsung Note 3 N900

I don't have a device anymore, but I still wish to share my experience and how I achieved 6 hours SoT with my typical daily usage on this phone.

This guide is for CM12.1 / AICP 10.0 (I recommend latter, it's the same CM 12.1 but with more options).

You can try this settings on aurora/stock ROMs with respective custom kernel (Suemax).

First of all, you need a kernel with Synapse support. This section is for CM12.1/AICP only! Don't try to flash these kernels if you are on Aurora/Stock - you'll have bootloop!

-- Download Stock and DJMax81's V2 kernel from this post and Suemax kernel from this post.

-- Make a backup

-- Flash CM12.1-DJmax81-Kernel-Lite-V2.zip

-- Boot your phone once and open Camera app to ensure it works.

-- Reboot to recovery and flash CM12.1-SueMax-Kernel-V3-By-DJMAX81.zip dirty. No need to wipe cashes.

-- If you encounter issues, restore backup or flash CM12.1-Stock.zip to return to the stock CM12.1 kernel.

Now you can fine-tune your Exynos!

First, disable touchboost. It's some sort of cheating Samsung use to make it's touchwiz not so laggy. On stock Android you simply don't need it, even if you set max CPU to lowly 250 Mhz, Stock Android UX is still decently smooth.

How to do this: open Synapse, go to the QoS tab. There are many, many sliders to control boost in different situations. Slide every one of them to the left. Now you gave full control of your phone freq to the governor.

This setting alone gave me up to 1 hour of SoT when texting or browsing. Because these are not demanding tasks and there's no need for CPU freq to ramp up.

Second, set min GPU speed to 100 MHz. This will save some juice when idle. Go to GPU Control in settings and set the corresponding Min freq slider to 100 MHz, then apply (you need to push the Set GPU settings button and a tick at the right top). You can also adjust Max GPU freq to suit your gaming needs. The more max GPU speed, the better gaming perfomance will be and the worse battery life in games (600 MHz stock value).

Third, let's go to Kernel Adiutor and here are some profiles for you that I found best!

Max Performance profile: Use zzmoove governor, max CPU speed to 1900 MHz, and at advanced governor settings set disable_hotplugging to 1.

Exynos hotplugging has rather negative effect on battery life as I found from my tests, you should never use it. If you are reading this and on Stock/Aurora ROM: disable hotplugging. It makes your battery life worse! Here is the test on Snapdragon 801, on Exynos hotpluging would yield even worse results because CPU with less core active will spend more time on unefficient A15 cores.

Zzmoove is the smoothest and fastest governor I found that still uses all available frequencies wisely.

That's the profile one should use for heavy games (and also set max GPU speed to 720 MHz in Synapse if you need it).

Performance profile: Use Interactive governor and max CPU speed 1900 MHz.

Interactive governor proactively ramps CPU to high (but not highest freq) to ensure great smoothness and still yield not-that-bad battery life (I had usually 4 hours SoT with 2G). For better fine-tuning you can go to advanced governor settings and set hispeed_freq to something in the middle, 800 MHz for example (but not lower than 800). hispeed_freq setting is the intermediate cpu speed which governor uses when there's initial load on cpu.

Balanced profile: Change governor to Ondemand, max CPU speed is still 1900 MHz.

You shouldn't worry, with touchboost disabled it would rarely ramp up to max speed, most often sitting on energy-efficient A7 cores and sometimes ramping to 1200 of A15, going even higher only when needed - still gives you whole power of your device without restrictions. DJMax81 did great job tuning this governor to our needs. You still can set max CPU lower (to 1400 Mhz) if you wish to conserve battery more on this profile.

Power saving profile: Go to Synapse and enable a slight touchboost: on QoS tab set CPU freq touchboost level 1 to 800 MHz (only the first slider). Then in Kernel Adiutor change CPU governor to Interactive. Set Max CPU speed to 1400. Go to advanced governor settings and set hispeed_freq to 400 MHz.

These settings are doing two things:

1. When not in use (e.g. you are not touching your phone), your device will use ONLY energy-efficient A7 cluster. So max 1300 MHz (it shows 650 MHz in Kernel Adiutor because A7 cluster is showing it's real freq divided by 2) with four cores - a performance level of middle-ground MTK device. Most often the phone will use 800 MHz freq of A7 (that's 400 MHz setting of hispeed_freq - a division by 2, remember)

2. When you are using device (actively tapping), touchboost will switch your device to A15 cores (starting from 800 MHz - at this freq they consume roughly same amount of energy as 1300 MHz'd A7) and if needed, interactive governor will ramp the freq even some more - up to 1400 MHz. When there will be no load, freq will drop to the minimum and system will switch to A7 cluster until next time you use it.

Extreme Power Saving profile: Disable touchboost, CPU governor is Interactive. At advanced governor settings set hispeed_freq to 400 MHz.

This makes your phone use ONLY energy-efficient A7 cluster no matter what circumstances. No matter what max CPU freq is set, interactive governor can't switch from A7 cluster to A15 (maybe that's a bug, but we'll use it). You can set max CPU speed to 650 MHz for sure, didn't make a difference for me.

Yes, it may lag. Yes, games are not playable. But we don't paint your screen black and white at least. :) Movies are fine, texting is fine, browsing too, 1300 MHz of A7 are still quite good - it's like low-end phone but with 3 GB RAM and AMOLED. ;) Combine it with lollipop powersaving mode and GPU powersave bias (set in Synapse, always clocks GPU at 100 MHz). And your phone will go on and on and on...

Don't forget to click thanks button. Tell me your experience. My device is broken so there could be some mistakes. My apologizes. Have a nice day!