Benefits to UNDERclocking?

So, I never really thought about it before but right now majority of my games except for the exception of Black Ops and maybe borderlands do not really need much juice to run smoothly.

For instance right now I am running the minimum clock EVGA permits (335/804/590) and yet I am still getting 60 fps on my WoW settings and no issues in other common tasks.

Out of curiousity does it save THAT much battery? Besides that are there really any benefits to it? Or should I just revert to factory settings?

I haven't seen any threads on the topic and was just wondering purely for educational reasons.

-Thanks for any information,
DeeVu

 

I added battery power consumption reporting and logging to the most recent version of:

ThrottleStop 2.90b8
http://www.mediafire.com/?p0psm43trbkj5su

You can try some lower GPU settings and then see how much that actually lowers power consumption. If ThrottleStop reports your battery has 50 wH (watt hours) of capacity and you drain it at 25 watts then it will last 2 hours. If you decrease the drain rate to 20 watts, it will last 2.5 hours (50/20) which is an extra 30 minutes while gaming on battery power.

When overclocking, Dell has disabled SpeedStep (EIST) and locked the SU7300 in the R1 to 6.0 x 266 MHz = 1596 MHz and they've also locked the VID voltage so you won't be able to make any changes to your CPU when testing. Can you change the 1.73 GHz number in your sig so new users don't misunderstand what speed the SU7300 is really running at? CPU-Z 1.56 is correctly reporting the speed of these CPUs so post a screen shot of that if I'm wrong.

Reducing your GPU speed will decrease its power consumption which also decreases the amount of heat it puts out. That's a good thing for most laptop users.

 

Alright so I am at 60wH and draining at 29watts. So 60/29 is ~2.1 so thats estimated battery life right now. Correct?
I updated my sig, thanks for pointing that out
Ill test things out then. Thanks a lot!

 

I'm trying to make everyone aware that Dell was stretching the truth when they claimed "overclockable to 1.73 GHz". That's impossible after they locked the bios. Phone and ask them for an M11x-R2 as a replacement to fix this problem.

It will be interesting to see how many watts your CPU consumes with the GPU at default settings compared to when you under clock it. The biggest savings can be had if you can reduce the voltage since power consumption tends to vary with the square of voltage. What that means in English is that a 10% drop in core voltage can, in theory, drop power consumption by 19%.

0.90 x 0.90 = 0.81

Dropping the clock speed is proportional to power consumption so there is less to be gained by doing that but still worth checking out.