What's the Point of UNDERVOLTING Your CPU?

How does undervolting or overvolting your CPU work - and how can you do it safely while still reaping the benefits?

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[techquickie]

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[th]

Not mentioned in the video: Intel XTU allows you to adjust a whole lot of these values in real-time while you're booted in Windows, completely bypassing the need to go into the bios every time. If the computer shuts down due to instability, the cached settings are wiped for easy recovery, allowing you to try again. Highly recommended!

[raifolson]

Wish you could have talked more about the physics of how changing cpu voltage affects the speed of the transistors and propagation delays. That is something that I think many people would be curious about when trying to understand why these things work.

[NinjAsylum]

What they dont tell you is that the 'expected' lifepan of a CPU at the recommended voltage is like 30 years at 24/7 uptime. I have a 2700k that has been running a 5.2ghz OC at 1.45v nearly 24/7 since 2013. Which is WELL above what Intel recommends. Basically, unless you're pumping ungodly amounts of voltage into the CPU, its going to last far longer than you'll ever realistically need it to.

[snowhawk]

Nvidia left the room in hope that there won't be a follow up about undervolting GPUs.

[gold]

On an i9-12900K I only managed a -0.110 V offset before it became too unstable but it still reduced temps by about 10-15 degrees while using 50 W less. Really glad this is being covered so more people can save a little bit of power

[misasuchomel]

There is one more really useful and Fairly common use of UV. Some of the more high performance, small body laptops, May be able to run your cpu at boost for only limited time. Undervolting can increase that time for longer workloads, or even make it boost indefinetly. I made my laptop perform almost 20% better in cinebench r23 by undervolting. To be fair i did get quite lucky in the silicon lotery, Most laptops wont get duch high gains, but almost all laptops can benefit greatly.

Edit: Cinebench is by no means a perfect performance measurring tool, getting 20% more score wont result in 20% more overall performace but i have seen a really nice improvement in more cpu intensive games and a great improvement in video rendering times.

[cyandrix]

Undervolting on my gaming laptop was a life saver. I'm not able to use a desktop in my situation and undervolting helped a lot with thermal throttling

[samuelvincent]

I messed around with undervolting recently. I have a 5700x with a max boost of 4.6 GHz. Now, with a 200 mHz boost override, my cpu hits 4.85 GHz while gaming without affecting temperature at all (stays below 60 degrees) and voltage never goes over 1.35V. Ran Prime95 for 4 hours and had no issues. Pretty nice.

[KoolGuy]

Undervolting was an absolute must for my Ryzen 5800x. The Chips temps ran way out of my comfort zone (Even throttling occasionally on Dark Rock Pro 4) but setting at least an offset helped a ton!

[tralphstreet]

You still didn't explain how undervolting can increase performance. I thought it was done because you can generally get away with lower power consumption, and about the same performance, but *increasing* it? How does that work?

[turbo]

Honestly guys thats a lot of info that is organized to be easily digested WITH ads, all in like 5 min? Excellent work 🤝

[DeSinc]

Just be careful to note you don't also lose performance as with my 5900x I recall undervolting too far would no longer give a harmless bluescreen, but instead reduce your actual CPU performance instead. This is preferrable to crashing but it's something to note that you can be invisibly reducing your cpu's performance in certain applications. Also some apps will drop performance more than others by undervolting too far without you noticing it. For example, in flight simulator I only dropped a couple of frames when undervolting however some other program dropped almost 10% performance without me realising until a few days later. Also funny clip at the end

[Ballantin]

He fails to explain why undervolting can help you gain some performance. That is, it can prevent your CPU from reaching throttling temperatures....

[GeorgeJFW]

Works great on GPUs also. I found even a small reduction leads to a noticeable improvement in fan noise with no noticeable hit to performance

[HITHEREWINSTON]

My 5950x was constantly running at 90c on stock voltage (1.4v). I undervolted it to 1.2v and the temps dropped by 30c. It's staggering how much of a difference undervolting can make

[TAPa]

The way I always understood it was:

- Intel and AMD always want to sell you a product that will work OOTB
- more voltage helps a given frequency stabilise
- therefore Intel and AMD will ship a voltage that is “safe” for every CPU they sell in a class, regardless of silicon lottery, leaving headroom beneath at stock clocks for undervolting without affecting stability that is dependent on the chip itself
- boost clocks depend on temperature, and throttle when temp gets too high
- undervolting releases less waste heat (P=IV) so allows normal boost algorithms to stay boosted for longer
- both Intel and AMD already target very aggressive frequencies for their CPUs, leaving typically very little room for the traditional “more clock more volts” method of improving performance
- therefore you’d either have to either not care or be silly to *not* undervolt

[jasonb]

Anthony looks like he is having less stress in his life and looking better by the video, with more confidence. He is one of my favorite hosts with his tech knowledge.

[ETEcco]

I did this on my laptop for better thermals, slight core ratio OC, working great so far.

[drewcipher]

It'd be really cool if there were an auto undervolting software for chips like there is for overclocking. That way the power savings would be available for everyone.