Undervolting

Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
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?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    Just by reading your first sentence I think it doesn't make any sense. If it was possible to have the chip running at the same speed while using less power and creating less heat I'm shure Intel would have already done it. Also there is always a risk of changing the voltage of computer componants. You can always try but I wouldn't recommend it. Plus, it most probably slows down the chip.
  • Reply 2 of 4
    wmfwmf Posts: 1,164member
    I have some experience with undervolting. When you go too far, it crashes. When it doesn't crash, it has an unknown probability of silently corrupting your data. For many people that's fine; after all, they don't complain about cosmic rays either. But Goettel is wrong about performance; there is no slowdown from undervolting.
  • Reply 3 of 4
    bodebode Posts: 29member
    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!
  • Reply 4 of 4
    jeffdmjeffdm Posts: 12,951member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by bode


    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.
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