Undervolting i7-4720HQ

Hi guys,

After reading that undervolting was easy on Haswell CPUs, I decided to give it a shot, I was aiming at shaving off like 5C from load temps ( fluctuating from low 80s to high 80s ) but something weird happened.

A -70mv undervolt made absolutely no impact, the CPU didn't seem to run any cooler while playing GTA V and yes, I did make sure that the undervolt was applied, monitored it using HWMonitor. I was wondering how much did undervolting decrease your CPU temps?

 

First of all CPU have 3 types of throttling: thermal, power and current, it could have been throttling more before undervolting and less now, keeping temp. similar but doing more work. Also I would assume you have fan on auto and without knowing temp. table, the fan could be ramping up to full speed less, again not showing any gains in temps. So without doing some specific tests where everything is equal, it may be difficult to see gains you're looking for. One way to test it properly would be to force the fan to maximum speed at all time and run exactly the same load twice, once before and after undervolting and then compare temps. If you can't force fan manually to maximum, another way would be to find some heavy workload that would force CPU into thermal throttling and again run once before and once after undervolting and see how fast and for how long you would have throttling.

 

Thank you for your reply! I'll try forcing fans to maximum and see if there's a difference.

EDIT : Looks like I have no control over fans.