Main Bus B Undervolt -- my success!

[Keatah]

Main Bus B Undervolt -- my success! Eco-Clocking is the new Overclocking.

With hardware being quite efficient and powerful enough for most folks nowadays, it is time to give up overclocking and turn to eco-clocking! That's right! With the new intel chips coming out this year and beginning of next, overclocking is going to be dying out. Not because intel wants it that way, but just by circumstance and design complexity of the cpu, whatnot with all sorts of things, including video, being integrated into it. Hell, they are even doing the southbridge blocks too, like the pci bridges and misc peripheral controllers!! All this stuff needs to run at a specific frequency. Mucking with it throws off the timing too much.

So, the challenge becomes how cool and how low-power can I get my rig working with. [!] ??

Well folks! I managed to big-time undervolt my old laptop, the one from 2004. It happens to be among the top 'investments' I made when purchasing electronics. Namely in the areas of reliability, stability, and consistency, does this computer ever shine!

Anyways, borrowing a page from NASA, I figured I could add some software or something to make the hardware better. And so I found a utility to micro-manage the voltages going to the CPU; and different voltages go to it at different clock speeds. Something too exotic for a cut-rate company to put into a system, and test and debug it.

When it runs at 600MHz the CPU used to use 0.9880 volts. Now I fixed it up so it runs at 0.7320v. And at 1.7GHz it used to use 1.340v, and I turned it down to 1.132v.. The Pentium-M Dothan series, designed in Isreal btw, seems to have been a successful sleeper-chip for Intel. No pun intended! For the time, it was one of the more efficient processors with a good IPC/watt ratio. The 735 was clocked at 1.7GHz, and the 765 was clocked at 2.1GHz. Both sported a less than 21watt TDP. Not too shabby back then.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is ULV territory! This translates into an extra hour of battery life!! The cpu runs much much cooler, the fan runs slower and doesn't need to go full speed as often.

I've run all sorts tests and it seems more than stable. Cache thrashes L1 & L2, MMX, SSE 1 & 2, ALU, ANSI C mathematical ops, CRC32 tests, FPU, INT, Scalar ops, Branch Predictions, TLB tests, Memory bus access - throughput - bit walk tests, prime95, SETI@Home, Orbiter, Typhoon 2001, X-Plane, HD-tune, RMMA, memtest, photoshop, backup operations, and other random day-to-day things.

And so far it has not crashed one bit! Carrying on in the *finest* of NASA traditions, milking every iota, every ounce of performance and efficiency from old hardware. This is just like the Voyagers.

Well, anyways "Main Bus B Undervolt.." Kept running through my head all frakking day long while I characterized and tested out the system..

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-350/ch-13-1.html

 

[JonnyBGoode]

I used to have an application on my old Dell Inspiron that would do that. I haven't found an equivalent ap for my new Vostro, alas.

 

[Keatah]

try nhc - notebook hardware control. It is working on my old system. But, there are consistency issues with hard drive power-down and spin-down. But anyways..

One thing I don't like about motherboards made from around 1998 through 2007 is the hugely confusing number of power-saving options, look here, in the BIOS you have --
ACPI, APM, PM CONTROLLED BY APM, video off methods, sync+blank, video off after, cpu fan on/off/suspend, Standby, Doze, Suspend, sleep, throttle duty cycle, hdd power down, wol, wok, power on by, PM timer events, irq modem or mouse break suspend. And that just scratches the bewildering array of stuff related to power management in the BIOS, and each bios is different, and usually a half-baked attempt at whatever it is trying to do.

Just what EXACTLY do DOZE, STANDBY, SLEEP, SUSPEND mean exactly and in what context?

Next you have all sorts of options in windows, and drivers to control that stuff, then drivers for each 'smart' device. And each device has its own internal power saving schema; of which sometimes it isn't compatible, fully, with the o/s settings or its drivers. And mfg's often put different power grades in the power save 'tables' in the hard drive, and some are based on acoustic management and whatnot. Some partially follow the acpi or apm spec.

Now bring in the third party utilities that make an attempts to allow you to control some of the 'missing stuff' in the bios and o/s, or to take control of individual devices. And these utilities have options that mean something different than what the same titled options mean in the bios and the o/s. Some screensavers do some power management, some don't. And worst off is when mobo mfg's start doing their own custom power-down 'stuff' and fan controllers. Some are usb based, some are built into the southbridge bus. blahh blahh!!

Some options break other options, some options make the system lock up, sometimes.

What a frakking nightmare!! Can't this stuff be simplified?? Look, we have BIOS, O/S, 3rd party utilities, device drivers, and devices themselves, all trying to control power-saving functionality. Too much interference going on!

 

[RisingFury]

Someone's been watching Battlestar Galactica :thumbup:

 

[Keatah]

Someone's been watching Battlestar Galactica :thumbup:

hah ha yeh, I finished the new series just this fall. I have the old series on tap for winter. Wintertime and TV dinners, BattleStar Galactica and classic video gaming. Can't beat that!



Anyways, While undervolting and Eco-Clocking, I get the full intended speed of 1.7GHz. And while running at that speed temps only go to 110 - 115 degrees F for the cpu. Just a bit warmer than body temperature. Nice and cozily warm in the wintertime! The fan turns on and off from time to time, and it doesn't get screamingly loud. I also do not lose any performance. This is a step toward elegant computing.

I'm not sure I need SpeedFan with my current configuration. Everything seems to be running fine. The fan in this laptop is about the size of a quarter, or maybe just a little bit bigger.

I used to be into overclocking for a short amount of time. I quickly found out that whatever gains I achieved, I could easily get the same improvement by waiting a few months for a price drop and getting the next grade-up in componentry. Like now, for $30.00 I got a 2.1GHz processor, 765, that will run in this notebook. No extra fans or anything, same TDP rating. The IPC (and pipeline) of this chip is much much closer to the Pentium 3, than it is to the Pentium-4. The Dothan core Pentium-M's are far more efficient per watt / instruction than the 'real' Pentium-4. The 2.1GHz variant performs as well as, if not better, than the 3.06GHz P4.

Overclocking seems to be fraught with problems, high temps, instability, random crashes, high costs of extra parts like beefy power supplies, big heatsinks, loud fans, fluidic cooling, big cases, time-wasting benchmarks etc.. Where is the payoff? The ROI?? Overclocking is for script-kiddie-type-experimenters.

As CPU's evolve and become more sophisticated, the industry will more and more want to put them in laptops and low-power applications. Lower voltage circuitry needs closer regulation, and to help the chips work in that environment, the chips will be far more tolerant (relatively speaking) of voltage swings. And we can take advantage of that by running toward the lower end of the specification; and thereby getting power savings and longer battery life! Undervolting is the new overclocking!

This particular laptop, a basic utility computer has seen a memory upgrade, external storage (usb drives) upgrade, a second monitor add-on, and a hard drive replacement after 5 years. I'm looking at getting that 2.1 ghz cpu in it shortly. When I first got the computer I took out the CPU and put some ArcticSilver compound on the CPU die. I also put a thin and tall bead of silicone sealant around the die. So this formed an airtight gasket around where the heatsink surface contacted the die. The silicone touches the substrate(chip carrier package) where the die is mounted on and the flat part of the heatsink. So 4 years later, the thermal paste is as fresh as it was the day I put it on. In fact, I just put a new bead of silicone around the die and remounted the 'sink! I did not have to replace the compound, it was as soft-gel-like now as it was on day one! The concept is similar to the diamond-anvil seal gasket. And it works!

I prefer cool, quiet, elegant computing, computing that is unobtrusive and just pain works without fiddling. A properly designed laptop should not be intrusive auditorily, thermally, aesthetically, or otherwise. Apple Computer Inc. is one of the few companies that gets the formula right!

 

[Ghostrider]

Someone's been watching Battlestar Galactica :thumbup:

Number 6 can undervolt any of my buses whenever she likes.:thumbup: