hello guys, I bought a dell Inspiron 13 7000, i7 7500u, 12gb RAM, 256GB ssd today. So my question is is undervolting worth it if the device does not thermal throttle, I know the battery life helps and lower temps help the laptop last longer, but it there a negative to undervolting, Most things i have read only talk about the pros and do not talk about the cons are there any?
Also where would be a good place to start on the i7-7500u haven't ever undervolted a low power laptop just gaming laptops, and they tend to handle a -0.150 V offset but i feel like the lower power CPU wouldn't handle that. Goin to test my self since all CPU's are different, but if anyone else has undervolted this cpu I would like to know the results.
Only thing that comes to mind is stability (and OC headroom), but that's something you can test for, so... no. I can only think of benefits to undervolting.
I undervolted my 5200u which is a similar dual core, hyperthreaded, 14nm part. Its rather easy. I keep mine at like -0.110 and it lowered temps a good bit. I also undervolted my desktop since its a xeon that doesn't support overclocking. Really undervolting only has benefits. Eventually you will go too low and it will crash, but you can just set it 0.010 higher than it crashed at and never look at it again. For laptop cpu's its especially beneficial, because you can drastically lower power usage which raises battery life and lowers temps.
That is what i thought and thanks for the information on the 5200u, i am currently doing steps of -0.025V, Also I am seeing a more consistence higher boost clock, something I forgot about with the lower temps
With GPUs some AIB vendors factory profiles start with more voltage than is needed for stability. Polaris is an example where on some custom cards you can reduce the voltage by over 60mv and still be stable. The Ryzen CPU at factory speed has benefited from undervolting as well.
Usually Intel places a conservative voltage on their CPUs and usually a good majority don't really need that excess voltage. Undervolting can increase the lifespan of the CPU in this case because it doesn't have to deal with the excess heat from the slightly above voltages than the CPU needed. Also in your case as you have said increased battery life.
I would first start dropping the voltage in small increments on the stock speeds on the cpu and stress test the stability of the i7 7500u on Intel Burn Test or Aida64. I would not suggest using Prime95 as a method of stability because it is well known to raise the voltages a bit and therefore more heat and potential throttling.
Also if the CPU can run up to 2.4ghz it can do any frequencies up to 2.4ghz so that means you can underclock low as possible as the BIOS permits you you just gotta find a safe voltage for that clockspeed so your not giving the CPU too much power than it needs etc etc. It's not like overclocking when underclocking where some dude's i7 7700K can overclock to 5GHz and yours cant go to 5Ghz. There are other factors that are involved why your i7 7700K does not want to go up to 5GHz
There are no negative factors to undervolt the CPU other than the stability (Crashes, Blue Screens, Lock ups and etc) which that can be remedied.
As for underclocking you are going to see: slowdowns, hangs, higher CPU usage and other things I have talked about
Also have you thought of opening up the laptop replacing the crappy TIM that came with the laptop with some high quality TIM which will help reducing the temperatures.
I will be pretty soon, going to swap out the SSD in a month or so with a 512GB it has a 256GB right now. Going to put it in my desktop as the new boot drive for it. It isn't NVMe, but still should be faster than my current SSD in my desktop. Anyway going to change the thermal paste then, arctic sliver should be fine on a Laptop right?
Artic Silver is fine but there are better thermal pastes out there without the massive curing time that Artic SIlver 5 has. If you have Artic Silver on your hands use that if not I would recommend using Noctua NT-H1
I mean I don't see why any decently modern laptop couldn't be. Also Dave 2d (Dave Lee) has a pretty decent video on youtube simplest way to do it (for intel uses intel software).
Alright thanks for the tip, will get the Noctua since I have to buy more anyway.