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Undervolting: Worth the effort?

AmieAmie Regular
edited February 2011 in Tech & Games
For those of you who don't know what undervolting is: basically, most processors can run prefectly fine at voltages a little lower than the factory settings. By lowering the running voltage of your processor, your computer stays cooler and your battery life increases. Here's a good guide for doing it.

So, any of you ever done it? Any comments? Worth the effort? Not worth it? I'm thinking about doing it myself, but it seems like it would cost me a couple days to do it well.
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Comments

  • BaconPieBaconPie Regular
    edited February 2011
    I tried it on my desktop when I was in an overclocking phase. In the end I gave up on all mobo tweaks. My motherboards is gimmicky and isn't really up to the job (ASUS Striker Extreme). It caused more hassle, more crashes and all I managed to do was shave off like 1 second from booting.

    My laptop doesn't really have much in the way of mobo customisation options so I can't do anything there. However I would say that if you wanted to save battery life then you'd have to perform a significant reduction in voltage to make any difference at all. You might get like an extra 10 mins. Probably better to just buy a bigger battery/don't be as heavy with the usage.
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  • UnknownUnknown
    edited February 2011
    It's a good idea actually, just make sure you turn off a setting known as "Speedstep" or something similar in the BIOS as you may run into problems. Personally I've never tried it (I increased the voltage in my CPU for overclocking) but I'd definitely give it a shot :thumbsup:
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  • KatzenklavierKatzenklavier Regular
    edited February 2011
    The thing is these processors aren't designed to run at lower voltages. The voltage they give is a guaranteed voltage at which all the gates are able to work. If even one AND gate stops functioning, then the whole thing crashes.
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  • UnknownUnknown
    edited February 2011
    Katzenklavier wrote: »
    The thing is these processors aren't designed to run at lower voltages. The voltage they give is a guaranteed voltage at which all the gates are able to work. If even one AND gate stops functioning, then the whole thing crashes.

    Can you say the same thing where overclocking is concerned?
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  • KatzenklavierKatzenklavier Regular
    edited February 2011
    Huh?
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  • HellishHellish Regular
    edited February 2011
    So, your saying every Intel Celeron 360 can reach 8242.45 MHz? I don't think so. If its a desktop, I don't see much of a reason, a Laptop however, is always nice.
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  • AmieAmie Regular
    edited February 2011
    OK, so I ran a couple CPU stress tests today, and the whole time my CPU temperature never got over 57°C while it was running at 100% and the fan was blowing the whole time on it's lowest speed. Great cooling on that laptop of mine, it was clearly intended to cool both the CPU and the GPU on maximum.

    So if I'm doing this, increasing battery life would be the only reason to do it. It's already pretty good (5 hours on a 6 cell battery - thank you Nvidia Optimus), but getting a little more juice out of it never hurts.
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  • UnknownUnknown
    edited February 2011
    Try this - charge the laptop to full juice, unplug, and run a CPU stress test until it runs out of battery (or as close to it as you want).

    Then undervolt it, and run the same test again to see how much difference there is in battery life when the CPU is under full load.

    :thumbsup:
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  • DfgDfg Admin
    edited February 2011
    ^Do that.

    I don't play with volts when over and under clocking but when it comes to Laptops it makes sense to downvolt. Give it a try anyway.
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  • KatzenklavierKatzenklavier Regular
    edited February 2011
    nvmd
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  • AmieAmie Regular
    edited February 2011
    Auschwitz Nazi Disneyland wrote: »
    I wouldnt' bother - the CPU itself doesn't use much in terms of total power consumption for the system...

    No, but it could reduce the temperature of my CPU further, which means less cooling, and the fan does use a lot of power.

    I'm gonna try it when I have the time. Not a very urgent thing.
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  • UnknownUnknown
    edited February 2011
    Yeah man, you might as well give it a shot and just see what happens. Can't really hurt, and it would be good to see what happens after tweaking like this :D
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