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Honorary Master
Hey guys,
So this morning I was a bit bored. I have a HP 530 notebook, running a T5200 Core 2 Duo 1.6GHz and the thing gets pretty hot. I happened onto an article on undervolting your CPU and decided to give it a bash.
I followed this guide, which is very complete.
I noticed that the core voltages for all the indexes were set to 1.175V, which is the maximum rated on the spec doc for my CPU, even though the CPU is rated to run down to 1.075V and should be able to operate at even lower voltages at slower speeds (Your system ought to scale your CPU speed based on load). Unfortunately my motherboard can only drop the core voltage to 0.95, which I did in the end, for all the different frequencies (It runs flawlessly at 1.6GHz at 0.95V and thus should do the same for all lower frequencies).
According to this formula I found, this drop ended up saving around 12W and increased my battery life, according to the battery meter, by around 15min.
The main thing though is that my CPU used to top out at 69C under 100%. This value has now dropped to around 59C and the effect is very noticeable with all the components in the system also running cooler. For example, my hard drive dropped 2C.
So there we have it, 10C temp drop, slight increase in battery life, all because of 10min of my time and I consider it definitely worth the effort.
So this morning I was a bit bored. I have a HP 530 notebook, running a T5200 Core 2 Duo 1.6GHz and the thing gets pretty hot. I happened onto an article on undervolting your CPU and decided to give it a bash.
I followed this guide, which is very complete.
I noticed that the core voltages for all the indexes were set to 1.175V, which is the maximum rated on the spec doc for my CPU, even though the CPU is rated to run down to 1.075V and should be able to operate at even lower voltages at slower speeds (Your system ought to scale your CPU speed based on load). Unfortunately my motherboard can only drop the core voltage to 0.95, which I did in the end, for all the different frequencies (It runs flawlessly at 1.6GHz at 0.95V and thus should do the same for all lower frequencies).
According to this formula I found, this drop ended up saving around 12W and increased my battery life, according to the battery meter, by around 15min.
The main thing though is that my CPU used to top out at 69C under 100%. This value has now dropped to around 59C and the effect is very noticeable with all the components in the system also running cooler. For example, my hard drive dropped 2C.
So there we have it, 10C temp drop, slight increase in battery life, all because of 10min of my time and I consider it definitely worth the effort.
