Undervolting: Learn the technique that helps to save energy in your PC and Laptop
You must know the term overclock. It increases the performance of your computer and is quite famous among gamers. There is also the underclock, what exactly does the opposite, reduces the machine's performance. In addition to the overclocking and underclock , there is also the undervolting, a technique that can greatly reduce the power consumption of the computer or notebook. Understand now how the undervolting and learn how to spend less energy on your computer.
What is it?
Although not widely known, undervolting is a simple technique to understand. It consists in reducing the voltage of the internal processor circuits in order to thus spend less electricity. It is estimated that by using the undervolting, transistors spend up to 20% less energy.
Why do undervolting?
Understanding why someone makes overclocking easy, after all, everyone wants to have a faster and more powerful PC. But why would anyone wants to reduce computer performance? For several reasons, imagine that particular machine is only a file server. It does not need a large processing power, just enough to access files on the hard drive and play them on the network. As it gets connected virtually all the time, the undervolting is a way out that spending on energy is not so great.
Moreover, by reducing the voltage of the internal processor circuits you also reduces the heat dissipated by it. With less heat, the coolers will work less. If you have a cooler with automatic speed control, it will just work all the time at the lowest speed.
With decreasing temperature, also we have the reduction of noise caused by coolers. Another benefit of undervolting is to increase the life of the processor. How it is working below what was projected and dealing with milder temperatures, it will probably work longer. So in the long run, the benefits of doing undervolting are several.
How to undervolting?
The undervolting is much more simpler to put into practice than the overclock, which is a more delicate process. In undervolting, you have to worry only reduce the processor voltage.
There is no specific step by step for all motherboards, but you can reduce these parameters accessing the BIOS of your board and navigating to the CPU voltage control options. It is important that you have expertise to make these changes.
Of motherboards ASUS and Gigabyte have utilities that let you make these changes without having to restart the computer, which saves time. The solution is the ASUS AI Booster and the Gigabyte's EasyTune, both for Windows. It is also important to test the stability of the PC when reduce the CPU voltage. Do this with the program Prime95 or some benchmark software that stress the processor. It will remain stable for more than 60 minutes, which means you can reduce the voltage a bit.
When the computer starts to crash or error screens appear, it means you got a voltage that causes instability. So, just return to the previous number and use the PC more energy savings.
Are there any risks?
Basically, no. The only risk you run when you undervolting is causing instability in the PC. But for me not suffer from it, just do the tests explained in the previous section and set a safe value for your processor. All manufacturers produce CPUs with a good safety margin between 8 and 10%.
Taking care of this, you only win as a longer life, lower power consumption, less heat, less noise and a battery life of the extended battery (for notebooks).
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