New Samsung Q310, help me! (undervolting etc)

Hello all, purchased today a Samsung Q310 with the Penryn P8600 CPU, I've been slogging ahead with undervolting/generally trying to improve battery life and other tweaks, so a few questions:

Any tangible advantage to installing Vista x64? I have been led to believe I can use the same key.

What power saving options do I have other than underclocking?

I've tried underclocking, due to the core being 9x multiplied I'm told RMClock should work, but I've followed the tut to the letter and no luck!

Although the settings in profile are showing a lower voltage, and are applied, but are making no difference to voltages as read by the software. Any clues on this one?

Also, I can't find updated drivers, but I think the current video ones aren't doing too well, as it seems nVidia have stopped doing generic drivers for geForce 9***m chipsets, are there any third party driver updates?

Lastly! Any solution to the fingerprint magnet properties of the computer? Or grin and bare it? !!!

 

Third party drivers: Laptopvideo2go.com

 

P8600 + RMClock works for me in Dell E6400, but I'm running XP, which makes it easier.

I wonder whether you have missed a step:

1. Set voltage in the main profiles tab

2. Go into a profile (I usually use Performance on Demand) select the use P states transitions and then select the multipliers you want to use (all)

3. Go back to the main profiles tab, select Performance on Demand as the current profile, then press apply.

I do, however, have problems with RMclock not using my power profile when it starts, but I think this is because of Dell's own power profile management.

I would point out that RMclock won't improve battery life under light usage. The lowest voltage is locked and since RMclock uses about 2% of the CPU time, this adds to the light usage workload. The main benefit of undervolting is to reduce heat under heavy CPU load.

What voltages does RMclock show on the CPU info page? My P8600 is 0.925V @ 6x and 1.1375V at 9x, so undervolting the latter to 1.05V (it crashed at 1.025V) doesn't save much power. However, when I first tried RMclock, it showed a maximal 9x voltage of 1.20V. I presume this was the IDA voltage. I never see this voltage now.

John

 

I've done all above and the CPU info page is reading
1.1250V at 9x, whereas I've set it to 1.050V....

I can't see anything not done that I should have, so no idea what's going on here. The power management setting (when clicking on battery icon) is still "Samsung optimized"; could that be the reason?

Cheers

 

Possibly. See what happens if you use an RMclock power profile.

I'm also using XP. You could try disabling UAC since it may be blocking RMClock from working properly (when I was using Vista then UAC didn't stay on for very long). Start > Run > MSconfig and look near the end of the Tools tab.

John

 

Disabling UAC is the first thing I do every time I'm using Vista,

I've adjusted to the RMClock power management option now and its still reading 1.1250V on the 9x multiplier!

 

Where are you reading the voltage? The maximal voltage on the info page won't change.

Give the CPU some work to do and look at the voltage on monitoring page.

John

 

ahh wow ok I was just being stupid. Thanks Ratsey!

So it seems stable enough at 1.050, ORTHOSED for a 5 minutes and got a max temp of 55c on the cores, is this a good result? I've been fiddling with the power settings and RMClock reckons I can get ~2hrs from a 41% capacity battery. I imagine this is fairly good in itself?

 

Ah!

My method for finding the OK voltage is to run the CPU stress program and drop the voltage one step and see if anything crashes. If OK then immediately then go down one more step (keep a note of where you have got to), etc. This way you quickly find the voltage which is too low (my P8600 hung at 1.025V).

Then go back up two or three steps and leave a stress test running overnight.

You should also be able to set the 6x voltage down to the SLFM voltage (but I put mine up to 0.95V from 0.925V after a crash). I then let RMclock interpolate.

John

 

Ive used RMclock on the P8400 and on RMclock the voltages are as low as they go which is 0.925V but CPU-Z is reading the voltages at 1.038, its not a major problem but Im not completely sure wheather RMclock is 110% compatible with the Certrino 2 (P) series.

 

You can use your current product key with x64. I've done this with Vista HP. I don't really see much difference but seems a tad quicker, but that could be down to a variety of reasons.

 

Vista 64-bit should be quicker, the only problem is it currently has more compatability issues and missing driver than 32-bit

 

ok Wow I'm getting no crashes atm at 1V, is this good? How do I test this for longevitys sake?

And what other mods can I do? How do I reduce the shared memory my gfx card takes, its screwing up my RAM readings!

 

edit: OK I've just downloaded CPU-Z and although I've apparently underclocked to 1.0V its reading 1.113V on CPU-Z is this a bug or a hardware limit?

 

cpu-z is usually right, so I would trust it.
I wouldnt worry about the difference in voltage that much, because it is pretty negligable.

K-TRON

 

hmm ok since undervolting to 1.0V it seems my temps have gone up? Is this normal ?
idling is way higher temp than it was, what could be the reason behind this?

 

It is 110% compatible
Did you try a different version of CPU-Z since some have reported that some versions (releases) are buggy.

For me, it easy to know if RMclock works; it's by monitoing the temperature and the fan(s). So if my temps. are lower and the fan(s) spins less than I've configurated RMclock correctly.

 

qpops got that same problem, it still undervolts, just not to the voltage said on RMclock, for some reason RMclock it setting the voltages to what it thinks is the voltage (ie, RM set at 1.125V CPU-Z says 1.238V or RM set at 0.925 CPU-Z says 1.038) but for me its actually 0.113V below the true voltage.

Thats assuming CPU-Z is right, what other programs monitor CPU voltages, I'll do a quick search.

EDIT: Just checked CPU voltages with EVEREST and it shows 1.04V which is te same as CPU-Z so RMclock its a little faulty on mine, not to the point where it damages anything, in fact it is still undervolted. What other undervolting programs are there? Excluding NHC, that work on Penryn/Centrino 2.

 

CPU-z 1.40.5 agrees with RMclock on voltages, CPU-z 1.42 (IIRC) or newer gives higher voltages. Nonetheless, RMClock is dropping the full load temperatures so it must be working. Perhaps it misreads the voltages across the range if Intel changed something with the Penryn CPUs (the last RMClock release was February and that was to fix the Santa Rosa support).

John