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 undervolting, 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,
increments of 5 or 10 millivolts at a time. Save, restart your PC and run your stress
test 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?
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 CPUZ. 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 any time 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 record. So 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 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. And 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. Like,
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