Help OC'ng laptop CPU

Hey there, can any app OC i processors yet? I was wanting to try a little experiment.

I've been using a 99% max CPU state for a little while and it knocks of 4 Watts in power and 0.30mhz in speed and I'm wanting to reinstate as much of that speed as I can with out increasing the reduced wattage.

I was wondering if I would need to mess around with RAM timings and things like that or is it just a case of upping the clocks of the CPU?

regards Alex

 

What laptop do you have and its specs?

I'm also now looking into a bit of overclock. You can start out by checking out SetFSB or SetPLL. Both. I'm looking into a way to increase fsb by 1mhz, but not found a way, yet.

 

inspiron 15r
i5 460m
ati 5650m
4gb ddr3 ram

I've went into power options and decided to drop the CPU max state to 98% which drops the watts to 21 roughly and the speed to 2.4ghz from 2.8 turbo boost.

It gives the best watt/clock ratio and if you put the laptop on high performance with 2.4GHZ CPU it gives only 3 marks less in 3dmark11 than a balanced power profile with a 2.5ghz CPU running with 25watts. 3 marks less gives me 4-6 degrees less, but I'm wondering if I could undervolt and overclock at the same time. I'm thinking it might be a way round intels i core block

 

Ok, I may have stumbled upon something here... using microsoft's CPU power management schemes and throttlestops multiplier controls, I may have my CPU running at full pelt with reduced voltage but I will need to do more testing, but initial tests suggest that it works pretty well.

will post back when I've done screenshots and hours of testing with prime and some ps2 emulator testing which seems particularly effective (don't worry all games on my emulator are backups, I can play at 3xnormal res, PS2 HIGH DEF!)

 

Honestly, I have a feeling your limited by the cpu cooler, even if you could overclock it.

What are your current temps @ load?

 

I'm practically unlimited as far as cooling goes (I have a custom cooler) I just sat with prime 95 and two instances of orthos running at 2.8ghz max turbo mode max wattage 30 watts (max TDPof the CPU is 25) and it made it to 64C.


I have a question though, I've been messing around with the tdp limiter on throttlestop and the clock modulation setting which if I reduce to 25% will reach max turbo mode on 21watts instead of 30watts.

Is this dangerous or am I missing something and its actually slowing down the CPU or something, it seems too good to be true really...

 

What do you mean you have a custom cooler? Like a custom cpu cooler that you installed? Any pictures of the process?

How long did you run Prime95, and at what selection/settings?

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And from Intel, it says the i5 480m is a 35w cpu?

Is overclocking "dangerous"? Possibly. Can you kill the chip? Yep. Can you overvolt the chip? Yep. Does it degrade cpu performance over a long period of time? Yep (abet years, not days or months [not normally]).

Though I'm not sure how much actual control you have to overclock with. And I'm not familiar with the model computer you have. So it's entirely possible your not changing the actual voltage (which is what ultimately kills chips).

 

not like a CPU modded cooler, like a home made external laptop cooler, made from bits of tube and a 110CFM case fan. It works really well, CPU can game in the range of between 49C to 57C depending if its on high performance and what percentage the max CPU state is at.

Right now I'm seeing what throttlestop can do with the lower voltages. Microsofts power manager has stepping for the i5 460m like this: 100% = 29.19 [email protected] / 99% = [email protected] and 98% = [email protected].

With throttle stop I can set wattages in between these wattages. 21,22,23,24 watts whatever I want pretty much.

I tried the clock modulation setting it didn't work that well... on 3d mark11 anyways it knocked off 100 marks.

Edit: its actually quite confusing trying to work out what frequencies I'm actually getting, because of hyperthreading. I can run Orthos which uses two threads and leaves the other two threads idle and it goes to 2.8ghz - full speed on as little as 22 watts.

Prime on the other hand puts load on all four threads, and this is the only time that I would need more wattage assuming I'm looking at it correctly, to get the reading on throttlestop to reach full speed I would need to give it around 29-30watts as opposed to two threads only needing 22watts to reach the max turbo speed

 

Ah, ok.

So is there a way to go over 100% or say 35w, which should put you @ 3.5ghz? (If I'm understanding correctly)


Usually a benchmark in which you loose points over your previous benchmark means something isn't stable. What stability testing software are you using besides 3dMark11? Have you heard of IBT (Intel Burn Test)?

 

Using this method gives you a much better watt/mhz ratio. As far as OC'ing past the turbo boost speed I think you would need to mess around with set FSB or something like that.

I'm trying to find the balance between heat/wattage/performance. the heat difference between 21 watts and 29.19 watts is nearly 10 degrees, but now I can have the performance without the heat.

It also removes heat from the GPU, allowing me to overlclock with less heat.

I've been using prime95 and orthos. Throttle stop from what I can tell will push the clocks as high as it can within the designed clock speeds without making it unstable, so its always going to be stable. It just depends - in my case - whether I'm using two threads or 4 and even then I get more speed using throttlestop instead of the windows power manager.

 

Ok.. I'm not sure I can even take a stab at this, because I'm totally unfamiliar with doing any sort of OC within Windows. I do all my overclocking on my desktop.. which I do everything in the bios, not Windows itself.


Are there any options in the bios that you can adjust? Multiplier? bclock? Anything?

 

Ah, Laptop BIOS's are locked down pretty tight unless you go the modded bios route but, even then it depends on what make of laptop you have and if you have decent cooling and even then the little OC you get won't be worth it. I mean I effectively downclocked my i5 by 400mhz and it made little difference to gaming or 3dmark scores. The biggest difference came when I changed the power setting to high performance - much less power fluctuation and in game stuttering.

I OC my GPU every so often for playing games, but the CPU seems a little more complicated these days especially with the mobile i core processors.

sorry I couldn't be more help

Edit: i recently tried undervolting my GPU and it involved extracting my BIOS installer, putting it through a program to dump every individual file then I had to find the vBIOS contained in the system BIOS files and it didn't work anyways, so if I were you keep the lappy cool so it doesn't feel the need to throttle itself, and if your going to OC your video card be careful of your temps, over 70c's usually bad long term.