What's the Point of UNDERVOLTING Your CPU?

did you know that you can increase your cpu's speed while also decreasing the energy it uses this is a common tactic called undervolting that's used by people who want to squeeze the most performance out of their system including while overclocking but how the heck is that possible and is it even a good idea to give your expensive CPU less power to find out and to get a better understanding of how CPU voltages work in general we spoke with Dan Ragland who's been the PC overclocking lead over at Intel for over five years and we'd like to thank him and Ben Benson for their contributions to this video and don't worry what we discuss in this video is relevant regardless of whether you have a team blue CPU or if you're more of an AMD person so let's get right to it the common wisdom is that if you really start pushing your cpu's clock speeds you'll probably need to increase voltages not decrease it but increasing the voltage carries some risks like you probably already know that it can increase your processor's temperature and shorten its lifespan but excessive voltages can also do this on their own even if you could somehow magically keep your CPU Cooler Than a popsicle you see both Intel and AMD processors have a reliability curve for their chips meaning there's a certain lifespan that they're expected to have at stock voltages and once you start raising that voltage you can start to expect a decrease in the lifespan exponentially a few tenths of a volt can cut years off of your cpu's life if you're constantly running at that higher voltage and another few tenths can reduce it down to Mere weeks or even days the exact curves themselves are trade secrets so they're generally not available to the public but given what we just said it's clearly better not to run your CPU at high voltages for too long hence the interest in undervalding which will save power and as put you as far on the safe side of the curve as you can be but how do you even do this properly well first you should figure out how much voltage your CPU is actually using right now under load at stock voltage settings download the free cpu-z utility open it up and run a program like cinebench or blender find the highest voltage value next to your cores on cpu-z and make a note of it afterwards head into your bios and find your cpu's core voltage and look for a setting labeled offset try moving that downwards make sure that you're using a negative offset in increments of 5 or 10 millivolts at a time save restart your PC and run your stress tests for a while to make sure your undervolt is stable at the frequency you're using if it is you can try to go lower and lower until you find that sweet spot where it's just basically about to get down to that crash point but you know maybe a notch or two above for maximum performance with minimal power and Heat oh it's cool but if you can get away with undervolting why do people set their voltages higher in the first place and how do they do it safely we'll tell you right after we thank grammarly for sponsoring this video grammarly is here to help you get your work done and be more productive it provides comprehensive spelling and grammar suggestions to ensure your writing is professional mistake free and Polished simply download the free desktop app log in and start typing there's also gramlock premium which provides more in-depth feedback on your writing such as tone adjustments that make you sound more confident and ensure that you're coming across the way you want to there's even a premium full sentence rewrite feature that helps you rephrase hard to read sentences for clarity go to grammarly.com techwiki to sign up for a free account and get 20 off grammarly premium today if you're really trying to push your clock speeds High you still might have to overvolt instead of undervolt and some users pushing for Max clocks also give their CPUs A Little More Voltage still just in case they hit a heavier workload than they expected as a general rule staying safe means you probably won't want to push your offset up by more than one tenth of a volt over what your stock value was from cpu-z and even then you might still be shortening your processor's lifespan if you're putting a load on it frequently of course using an offset or using adaptive mode will only push your CPU up to that maximum voltage anytime you enter a load however make sure you stay away from the override setting unless you know what you're doing because that will run your CPU at whatever voltage you set all the time that's there for folks who are into competitive overclocking or chasing some kind of Records so uh yeah probably don't use that for daily driving unless you really don't care what happens to your processor or the rest of your system oh and if you're curious adaptive mode is just an alternative to offset that allows you to define a new maximum boost frequency to go with your voltage Target but uh speaking of the rest of your system what about all those other voltage settings you see like vccsa or pmic those actually affect your memory and if you have an auto memory overclocking scheme like XMP or Expo turned on you really don't need to touch these this XMP and similar features optimize these voltages for you automatically now I know that you're watching this video because you love fiddling with the dials but sometimes that can be a really bad idea just try it in flight simulator if you don't believe me thanks for watching guys uh like dislike check out some of our other videos caught up with video suggestions down below and don't forget to subscribe and follow

Channel: Techquickie

Views: 461,097

Keywords:

Id: 9b3JUiK1aWU

Length: 5min 16sec (316 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 31 2022