Hey guys, I'm Tom the Tech Jap and if you're regular on my channel, you know that I review a lot of laptops. Usually pretty powerful ones with graphics cards and i7 and i9 processors. But there's a problem because when companies try to pack as much power as possible, as much performance into a laptop that has a thin and light chassis, it's all the rage to get nice and thin laptops. Well, that can often lead to a bit of a problem with cooling which results in what we call throttling where the processor sort of steps down in its sort of clock speed and its performance and so if you're exporting a video, you're playing a game, you're rendering, doing some sort of intensive task, then you may actually see your performance drop quite considerably.
So in this video I'm going to talk to you about undervolting which sounds really scary but actually it's not. It only takes a few seconds and there really isn't much risk to it, nowhere near as much as say overclocking because I've I've been doing this for a while on a whole bunch of laptops, and the worst that's ever happened is a blue screen of death which then just reset the undervolt and then I can just tweak it from there. No major problems but you know caveat that by saying nothing is guaranteed you are still tweaking the settings but anyone can do this and really the risks are very low. So by undervolting you can reduce your laptop's temperature, increase its battery life and get more consistent performance.
And in some cases it can even boost performance anything up to 15% from my tests. So undervolting is where you lower the voltage going to the processor or CPU in your laptop, and a lower voltage means less heat so the CPU can run cooler, fans can run slower and quieter, and the chassis won't get as hot. But generally the older the laptop or the more powerful and hot and hungry the laptop is, the more benefit we may actually see.
So the idea is by undervolting the CPU it'll be able to maintain higher average clock speeds before throttling as it takes longer to heat up which effectively boosts performance. This is especially useful for sustained CPU loads like exporting video, rendering and even potentially playing games. I get to test a whole range of different laptops whether it's a Dell XPS, Acer Concept D7 here, MacBooks, Razer Blade Advance and one of the first things I always do is install this Intel Extreme Tuning Utility or XTU and undervolt it because when I'm editing 4K video and I've got loads of Chrome tabs open, sometimes they can start to chug and slow down And I have found quite consistently, although it can be a little hard to show and benchmark sometimes, but it does make everything a bit smoother. In fact, some Razer laptops are even undervolted out of the box now. You can also undervolt desktop CPUs and, of course, graphics cards, but for now, I want to concentrate on laptops.
All right, so let's get into it, and I recommend using either Intel's XTU program, which I reckon is the easiest and most intuitive way to undervolt, but only if you've got a compatible processor. If you don't, then throttle stop is a great alternative, but it is a little bit more daunting to use. So let's look at XTU first.
Jump straight into stress test and run it for about half an hour. This will give us our baseline for CPU temperatures and also average clock speeds, which we can track with something like hardware monitor. So after this test you can see I was getting around 74 degrees Celsius on average, which is already pretty good as my laptop has a decent cooling system, and my average clock speed over the run was 3.6 gigahertz. Okay, time to undervolt.
Jump over to the core tab and then select the core voltage offset and set to small undervolt, say negative 0.05 volts. Then click apply, go back to the stress test and run for another half an hour to ensure the system is still reasonably stable. If all seems well then keep dropping it in 10 millivolt increments and retest until the system locks up or crashes. If that happens then just restart, go back into the XTU and put it back to where it was stable. This is your limit.
Minus 100 millivolts or minus 0.1 volts should be achievable in most cases. And for me this resulted in my average temperature going down by 5 degrees celsius and the CPU was around 5% faster. But from my experience I know I can push this a little bit further so I actually went down to minus 0.14 volts and this is what I'll set it to. Once you're happy with your undervolt run a stress test for a few hours to ensure it's stable.
Throttle stop is much the same it just looks a bit more daunting. First off I recommend you do an initial stress test with something like Prime95 to get your baseline temperatures and average clock speeds. Click the FIVR voltage regulator button, unlock the adjustable voltage and then set the offset voltage to minus 50 millivolts.
And then do the same for the CPU cache voltage offset. Select save voltage immediately, press ok and then stress test again for around half an hour. And if all goes well then keep dropping it in 10 millivolt increments and retest.
If that seems like a lot of work and you can't really be bothered just going between different increments and seeing how far you can get, I've never had a problem with a laptop just setting it to minus 100 millivolts and just leaving it there. That should give you some boost without you having to tweak every little millivolt and all that. So if you want quick and dirty, I'd recommend going for minus 100 millivolts. So what kind of a difference did it make? Well, I ran some CPU-intensive benchmarks on three laptops from around the office.
Using my Gigabyte Aero 15, I hit a stable undervolt of minus 0.145 volts. which saw temperatures drop 6 degrees Celsius in stress testing. Running Cinebench, temperatures were only 2 degrees cooler, but the The average score jumped by 18% and the Geekbench multi-core score went up by around 9% That's pretty impressive and I saw similar results when I undervolted my Dell XPS 15 i9 machine earlier this year I managed the same undervolt on my Razer Blade 15 Advanced which increased my average clock speeds by 12% and lowered temperatures on average by 3 degrees which boosted Cinebench R20 scores by nearly 14% and around 3% in Geekbench And in the real world, it exported a 4K Premiere profile 7% quicker.
And finally, with the 2019 Huawei MateBook X Pro Ultrabook, where I actually had to use throttle stop, but I managed to undervolt it by minus 0.135 volts. Now it didn't actually increase average clock speeds, but it did allow it to maintain the same clock speeds for longer, meaning more consistent performance, all while bringing down temperatures by around 5 degrees. So I did see some real difference by undervolting and it's all about that consistent performance because really a lot of this comes down to marketing you know laptop companies Intel AMD they want to say that they have the highest gigahertz speed possible to make you think it's faster and go and buy that particular one but faster and more powerful isn't always better especially if you don't have a good cooling solution so I reckon everyone should try undervolting as I say it's very very low risk take your time with it but you may see a nice little boost to laptop and it's completely free.
So I hope you found that useful and I'd love to hear how you get on if you do give it a go. Let me know in the comments below if you see any difference and also what kind of max undervolt you can actually achieve on your laptop. Thank you so much for watching guys.
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