Such a thing as underclocking the GPU?

It's possible the drivers already do such a thing... is there such a thing as underclocking or undervolting the GPU for the sake of cool temperatures and longer battery life, when simply at the Windows desktop?

I have a XPS 1530M with the 8600GT graphics card and sometimes it's a lot hotter than I'd like it to be simply web browsing. For that kind of thing, heck, it could be clocked at 1/10th the speed and still perform just fine.

 

i wouldn't do that if i were you... instead maybe you should take a look if you have debris in your vents.

 

I beleive it is possible. Underclocking can be done by software and can possibly get you better battery life, but only a few minutes maybe. AFAIK undervolting has to be done via flashing the BIOS and I wouldn't recommend it unless you know what you are doing.

Oh, and as the previous poster mentioned, definately clean out your vents if the machine seems to be getting a bit hot.

Duane

 

send it in for repair

 

yea, just go ahead and throw that out there without any other information..........

People's definitions of "hot" are a lot different, and without knowing temps from hwmonitor or something else, that's not a good suggestion to just throw out there, since its probably working fine.

If you are looking at over 90C then, that's too hot, but anything under that is about normal on an 8600GT

 

Make sure you are using Nvidia's notebook driver, it has the "power mizer" function which actually does this anyway, it underclocks the GPU when it's not in use.

You can see what the current clocks are at using GPUZ, a great little program.

 

Does anybody know a program which will perform the job of underclocking a GF 8400 on M1330?

 

@TrueSilvo: As long as you have installed a proper NVIDIA Mobile driver (i.e. from Dell's site or the Mobile driver from NVIDIA's) then make sure you enable PowerMizer (it's enabled by default) then your GPU will automatically downclock itself.

For example, as I'm typing this my GPU (I have m1330 too) is

Core Clock: 169Mhz
Mem Clock: 100Mhz

It's built into the driver Download GPUZ and check your clock speeds with that.

 

You can underclock your GPU quite easily, but to be honest, I think it will have very little effect on battery life or temps.

When you are on the desktop or doing non-intensive things, your GPU will be running on it's 'standard 2D' profile. Here is the 8600M:



You can go ahead and lower those clocks all the way to the minimum if you want, but really, it will make little difference to temps or battery life. I would not bother.