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