[ASUS ROG Phone II Questions & Answers] venkatesh321:
Most of your know about this problem. People complaining about phone heating, phone shuts down in the middle of gaming, heating while gaming with 90hz in all forums. But no one come up with the solution and Some even told us to send the phone to get serviced [yeah, but even then the service center will say that it is motherboard fault, which is the costliest replacement of all around 25k INR]

[NOTE: I want this to be heard by ASUS to release software update. If you are a moderator of any Asus forum or who could contact ASUS dev, share this thread with them]

First and foremost we have to understand what is causing the problem. And everyone who is facing the problem knows Its the Temperature causing the shutdown. But ASUS never implemented any Warnings to to the UI, instead they give active cooler to 256+ GB version, while leaving 128 GB owners stranded. I faced the shut down problem when updating to A10 around a year back.

Every time when I game outdoor on warm condition (around 30 degrees) and After few months of updates, it started to shut down very frequently. So I switched back and forth to custom ROMs and even to stock A9s.

Faced the worst embarrassment "Gaming phone shuts down in front of cousins who were playing in budget phone"

Finally my Gaming phone become a phone which cant game anymore.

Finding the real Problem:

After researching about android thermals and I even tried to stop the shutdown from happening to my device. But I failed and my device successfully shuts down when there is a chance.

I switched to custom rom and installed GCAM. On taking few photos, my phone died. After restarting and enabling the CPU overlay which shown the temperature and clock speed of CPU. Opened GCAM and took some photos the temperature rose from 40-65 degrees in an instant and it died and I noted all the CPU cores are ran at max clockspeed.

So, I switched back to stock rom, used Armoury crate to limit and limited the CPU clock speed of GCAM, Again same result phone died (like the custom rom Armoury crate displayed the max clock speed of 2.96 Ghz, though the app was being set to use lower clock of 1.92 Ghz)

After using and failing to limit CPU clock using kernels, It was conclusive that the temperature is not causing the issue, "NO_THROTTLING" of CPU does.

During heavy load on CPU like gaming or benchmarking, all CPU cores will run at high clock speed, which increases the temperature of CPU. To counterfeit this, the system applies slightly lower max clock speed to all its cores, makes the CPU to run at slightly lower clock speed. As the temperature increases the max clock speed will get reduced till it can no longer produces heat (auto cooldown) on doing work. Same applies for GPU. This is called throttling.

What will happen, when throttling doesn't happen? All CPU and GPU cores run at max speed which increase the temperature, when there is nothing to stop the rising temperature. The temperature rises further [A10's thermal management kicks in] and shuts the device.

During charging, the CPU temperature will be higher due to battery dissipating the heat, so when there is even slight load on CPU (background activities like downloading) rapid rise in temperature even for few milliseconds kills device.

Maybe none of the testing devices have this problem & none of the developer devices have this problem, but this problem does exist and I'm asking ASUS to release the patch for devices which lacks controlling CPU clock speed via Armoury create, and fix the device which doesn't throttle (thermal engine)

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Temporary Solution: Manually down clock the CPU and GPU

After so many failed attempt to apply lower clock to CPU, I found the location where the max clock speed file was located.

[I modified the file and put together in tasker (paid app to automate things) found my CPU finally throttled again]

I shared the values taken from asus thermal management applied those values and uploaded it.

Be careful, This might brick your device if used improperly, if that happens you might need to flash raw image so backup anything important. Don't point me the finger afterwards. If you are okay with that lets proceed.

We Need root access and root browser. If you have root access open any root browser and Extract the attached zip file

It has two folders and some files. CPU Reading folder has all the CPU max clock speed you can use to apply lower clock.

the folder contains 9 digit number like 295241178

First 3 number denotes max clock speed of Prime core i.e., 2.96Ghz

Next 3 numbers denotes max clock speed of Big core i.e., 2.4Ghz

Last 3 number denotes max clock speed of little core i.e., 1.78Ghz

for GPU First 3 number is the MHz of max clock (6750 is 675 MHz)

Select the clock speed you need

(lower number = lower clock speed = low performance = less heating

Higher number = high clock speed = better performance = more heating)

CPU has 9 different clock speed littleBigPrime combos

Gpu has 5 different combos

Applying clock speed

Replace the CPU file cpu_max_freq to the folder /sys/module/msm_performance/parameters

Replace the Gpu file max_gpuclk value to the folder /sys/devices/platform/soc/2c00000.qcom,kgsl-3d0/kgsl/kgsl-3d0

Replace those files and see if your device shuts down on gaming, if it does choose the lower value and repeat the process.

Everything should work properly now. It might not be great solution but it will prevent shutdown.

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