Undervolting
Apparently, we can lower the voltage on our CPUs on Intel laptops, and they will operate at the same speeds but cooler, and drawing less power, enabling longer battery operation.
linkage: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=334#comments
Anyone played around with this? Are there any dangers to the hardware? Will it really cause OS X crashing? How frequently? How much extra battery life have people managed to eek out?
linkage: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=334#comments
Anyone played around with this? Are there any dangers to the hardware? Will it really cause OS X crashing? How frequently? How much extra battery life have people managed to eek out?
Comments
Sounds stupid to me. Like somebody said... if that was a good idea Intel would have done it before!
That's just crazy. Do something in your computer that will increase the probability of crashing? It's like making a hole in a boat and see if you can still sale it... you can... for a while... until it sinks... it might not sink for some time... but it will sink for sure... so why do it anyway?
Sounds stupid to me. Like somebody said... if that was a good idea Intel would have done it before!
Intel generally puts a pretty healthy stability margin in their chips. That's how people can manage to overclock their chips a lot with even simple cooling methods. Even if you don't like the idea of undervolting, it appears that app also allows you to underclock the chip too, which has an impact on power consumption.
The software has a weird idea of "Try before you buy". The only features that are active on an unregistered version is current clock and current voltage, it won't even let you do a time-limited use of actually setting them to see how well it works. I don't know how I can try to see if it works with my Mac if the program won't even perform its basic function without buying.