Underclocking a laptop to save battery life

[Nvidiaguy07]

My new laptop has a P8600 in it thats clocked at 2.4GHZ. If i take it down to like 1.6 do you think it will be worth it?

Has anyone else here done this?

Im bringing this to school with me and would like to get as much time as possible on it.

 

[Brainonska511]

These days, it is generally not worth it. The power-saving features of the processor are more than enough for keeping the battery life up.

By locking the processor down into a low clock, you can actually end up using more power because it will take longer to finish different things, thus expending more power instead of letting the processor come out of it's low-power state, enter the fast state, quickly finish and then go back to sleep.

 

[ther00kie16]

those cpus can generally be undervolted by .1V or so to cut down on the heat by 10C or so. google undervolting guide. should be first post in some notebook forum. it will tell u how to undervolt to extend battery life. if you really want, you can also prevent the cpu from entering the higher p-states (higher multipliers).

 

[corkyg]

That would not be too significant. The big battery eaters are the optical drive and the display and the use of USB devices.

 

[mpilchfamily]

Not to mention in order to underclock the CPU you would need access to those features in the bios. Unfortunatly those featured are locked out on most notebooks.

 

[fralexandr]

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2216927&enterthread=y

i'm using notebook hardware control to undervolt my notebook
http://www.pbus-167.com/

it wasn't that hard to do, but i dunno if it does anything. some people report problems with performance after using it i think, but i haven't noticed much if any.

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

Why not just buy a 2nd battery if it's that big an issue?

I can get 6 hours out of my $600 toshibe with a t5800 and 4GB ram playing DVD's or MP3s.

I just crank the screen brightness all the way down and turn off the wireless in BIOS if I'm not going to need it.

 

[NitrouseXpress60]

Use NHC. I love that program so much that I prefer to use XP over Ubuntu because of it.