Lenovo Power Manager + Starcraft2 (Gaming)

I've been messing around with the power manager trying to get the best performance out of Starcraft 2 on my T420. I haven't seen any thread on this, so I thought I'd share my findings here. My T420 has the i5-2520m processor so you may need to adjust the following numbers to your respective processor speeds.

The most important setting is System settings -> System Performance. This is what controls all the throttling of the system.

• Low - CPU throttled to 800MHz, GPU throttled to 650MHz. Neither will change
• Balanced - no CPU throttle, GPU throttled to 650MHz (maybe a little higher, I never paid attention)
• Turbo - no CPU throttle, however the clock will hover around the Max clock and Turbo clock on idle, GPU throttled to 850MHz
• Maximum Turbo - same CPU behavior as Turbo, no GPU throttle.

No other setting will affect your laptop performance as this one. the Advanced Settings -> PCI express option might help a little, but I haven't messed with it, so I can't tell.

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Starcraft 2
I have the 1600x900 screen and I like to play games at the monitors default resolution so those who did not get the higher resolution screen or is fine with a lower resolution will probably have better results than mine. For the most part, if you are running with Maximum turbo, you can easily play SC2 on low at a very nice fps (40-60) in an average ladder game. 1v1s and 2v2s, there shouldn't be very much fps drops, but in 3v3 and 4v4, when there are significantly more units on the map, I can't say how much the fps will drop since I have not played a long game like that. I may update this later as I play some matches.

Graphical Settings

Texture Quality - This setting rely's on the graphics ram. Sc2 says it recommends low, but I think integrated graphics simply pulls more ram from the system because I set it on high and did not see any fps drop. I only saw my ram usage go up.
Shaders - This is the biggest changer of performance. Upgrading this from low to medium brought my fps down about 15-20. If you want smoother performance, I would advice leaving this as low, although this setting is what makes everything shiny and sparkly. Those on the lower resolution may be able to upgrade this without such a performance drop.
Everything else - I would just leave them as low because they aren't all that noticeable.​

One odd thing I noticed was that the game ran with higher fps in windowed (fullscreen) than fullscreen. This is usually opposite, but it wasn't the case here.


Precaution - I did run some benchmarks to find the GPU throttle because I was unhappy about the GPU clock not running at its full screen, but the CPU temperature rose to about 81-83C with something like a 10-15 test run of SC2 on maximum turbo. I would monitor the temperature closely during longer gaming hours.

One more thing, I did receive the 90Watt power supply because the DOS edition allowed a free upgrade for some reason and there was no CPU throttle without the battery.