Korth wrote:
How do you get free performance by deliberately throttling your parts down to slower speeds just to avoid having them automatically throttle down to slower speeds?
Undervolting is not the same as throttling. We are lowering the voltage being pumped into the chip, not limiting it's clock speed (unless you are someone who is also disabling turbo boost).
Generally speaking manufacturers pump more voltage into a CPU then it needs to run at its given specifications. This is to accommodate chips that have lower tolerances. This means that often you can run it at a lower voltage than it came out of the box with, without impacting performance. It still runs the same speed, just with less voltage being pumped into it.
In my case (and the case with many of these GL series notebooks) our laptops are thermal throttling at stock settings. By running them at lower voltages, they generate less heat. By producing less heat, they no longer thermal throttle.
In my case, I went from a laptop that would throttle down to between 2.8 and 3.0 ghz across all cores while being up at 95c to a laptop running at 3.4 ghz across all cores at around 80c.
So I suppose my claim of 'free performance' depends on whether or not the laptop was throttling in the first place, but since we were talking about this in a thread about laptops that are struggling with heat I figured it was pretty safe to assume most all of us were in that boat.
