The Galaxy Note 5 was easily among the most powerful Android smartphones released last year. Beside coming with a powerful internal, which includes an Exynos 7420 chipset and 4GB RAM, the Note 5 also featured a beautiful and premium looking design that have been missing from Samsung devices since all these years.

That’s not to say the Note 5 is perfect though. Despite Samsung toning down the bloatware and TouchWiz on the handset, the software is still not optimised properly to take advantage of such a powerful hardware. This is where custom ROMs come in. By removing a bunch of pre-installed bloatware and optimising a few things, custom ROMs help in significantly improving the performance of the Note 5. Additionally, they also add in a bunch of customisation options that allow you to change the look and feel of the phone completely.

So, if you are looking for some custom ROMs for the Note 5, check out our recommendations below.

Note: Keep in mind that installing a custom ROM on the Note 5 requires that the handset be rooted with a custom recovery like TWRP installed. Doing so will trip KNOX which will void the warranty of the device, so proceed with caution.

Dr.Ketan ROM

Dr. Ketan’s ROM for the Note 5 adds a lot of customisation and usability features to the handset. The developer has also tweaked the ROM to improve RAM management and overall system performance.

Features:

• Auto Memory
• Status bar customisation
• HeadsUp notification enabled
• Toggle Fast charging
• Auto 2G
• Call recording
• Multi DPI
• Multi Window for all apps
• Floating message
• Sound boost
• Auto Starts

If you need a ROM that offers a bunch of customisation option, definitely give Dr. Ketan’s ROM for the Note 5.

Download: Dr. Ketan ROM

Read: How to install a custom ROM on your Android device

Venom-Note

If you want an a ROM that offers almost all imaginable customisation options and performance tweaks, Venom-Note from developer riirezende is worth a shot. The developer has incorporated almost every available performance tweak in his ROM to improve the performance of the Note 5. This includes reducing animation scale to 0.25x, improving the scrolling performance, removing most of the system apps, and more.

Other notable features of the ROM include support for 1033 fonts, Adblock, stock Google emoji, various camera modes, and game tuner. The ROM also comes with Xposed pre-installed so you can directly install any module you want to customise the OS anyway you like.

Download: Venom-Note

DeathNote ROM

If you want a simple no-frills ROM for your Note 5, have a look at the DeathNote ROM. Based on a slightly older firmware, the ROM packs in the Edge screen feature found on the Galaxy S6 edge. Beside that, the developer has tweaked certain things here and there to improve performance and battery life, but nothing on the extreme side.

Download: DeathNote ROM

Sadly, due to KNOX and its limited availability, the amount of custom ROMs available for the Galaxy Note 5 is on the lower side. There is no AOSP based custom ROM available for the handset due to the lack of sources and its locked down bootloader, which might be a bummer for many.

Nonetheless, one of the three ROMs from above should quench your thirst for customisation and performance from your Note 5.

Which ROM are you currently using on your Galaxy Note 5? Drop in a comment and let us know!