Undervolting the Thinkpad X120e

After a very successful attempt at undervolting the E4300, I'm undervolting this baby. I've 3 of this of I guess I'll see which has the best chip and sell off the other two. For now this is my report for one machine. I'm not using the fan btw, it has been turned off because I believe in no moving parts. This has an SSD and 1 stick of Samsung Ultra Low Voltage 4GB RAM.

P0@1600Mhz 1.1375v - hangs soon at anything lower (63C Orthos 5min)
P1@1280Mhz 0.9875v - hangs soon at anything lower (59C Orthos 5min)
p2@800Mhz 0.8000v - crashes completely at anything lower (57C orthos 5min)

I also tried p1@1066 0.9625 but the computer never used that and always jumped straight to 1600HMz so I felt it was pointless. And it's not fast enough at 1066. I also tried at p2@533Mhz 0.7626. Computer runs at this speed and is stable, but browsing becomes laggy and video skip. Audio plays smoothly though.

 

Sorry for bumping this thread, but I basically registered just to be able to ask a couple of questions before trying to undervolt my netbook.

First, thank you MidnightSun for this guide. I'm sure it'll be useful to me.

Here are my questions:

-I do not have the X120e, but the X121e because I'm in Europe. This is not the Core i3 model, but the older E-350 model with a 6-cell battery, 8GB of RAM (upgraded from 4GB), Windows 7 Home Premium x64 and a 7200rpm 320GB HDD (soon to be replaced by a Crucial M4 128GB SSD). I have the latest BIOS (1.15). Do you think the guide will work nonetheless?

-I'm a complete noob to undervolting, but the word volt kinda scares me here: standard voltage, as you may know, is not the same as in the US. In France where I live it's 230V. Would that have any kind of influence on the whole thing? Or am I asking a very "cute" question here?

 

Probably should work. They should be very similar systems.

A cute question, as it turns out. You're talking about AC mains voltage, and we're talking about the voltage the processor gets. Mains voltage gets converted to the appropriate DC voltage a couple of times before it gets to the processor; it's all the same past the power brick, basically.

 

Yep, great answers, johan851. The X121e model based around the E-350 should work exacty the same as the X120e for the purposes of undervolting.

 

Thanks.

Hehe, I kind of expected that, but since I know nothing about voltage and how AC voltage and the voltage that goes to the processor, I'm better safe than sorry. I wouldn't want my netbook to crap itself since it's also my main computer.

I'll try your procedure then. Wish me luck!

 

Okay so I've already run into my first issue:

When I create a new task, following all the steps in the five tabs, and finally press Okay, I get the following error message (translated from French): "User account restriction error. The possible reasons for this are unauthorized empty passwords or a restriction of strategy which was applied".

I'm assuming this has to do with administrator privileges, but here's the thing: technically I only have one account on this computer, and it has administrative privileges. I've tried fiddling with the RW-everything folder, the ZacateUndervolting.rw and rw.exe files, to no avail. This is not the first time I run into issues regarding administrative privileges (for instance, I recently tried to change the Windows 7 Start Orb, but could never do it in spite of all my efforts and all the help I got), so I'm really stumped here. What are all the steps to ensure that I absolutely, positively, 100% have ALL administrator privileges on my computer? I really like Windows 7, but if there's one thing that seems to have gotten more annoying, it's the UAC stuff. Speaking of UAC, yes, I have turned it all the way down, and my user account says "administrator", but evidently Windows 7 must be playing a trick on me because it sure likes to behave like I'm not sometimes.

(I've read that Windows 7 advises users to have at least 2 accounts as a general rule. Could it be it? Could the OS be confusing the administrator's account and the regular user account because I only one single account?)

 

Sorry for bumping this thread once again, but would anyone have any idea how to solve the problem?

 

So I managed to create the task. Turns out I had to set a password.

Now that I've done all the steps in the first post, I seem to be getting pretty high voltages: CPU-Z tells me 1.087-1.350V.

Is this normal?

On the plus side, accordint to TPFC the CPU gets hotter than 65°C and can get as low as 60°C, and the fan stops often (albeit randomly and never for more than a few minutes it seems). Otherwise it's got a 550-555 RPM speed.

Is anything wrong, or does my chip just suck?

 

tried the 'search' function on my question... failed, as it always does.

have any of you ladies or gents done a thermal paste job on this guy?
I'm trying to find a guide/tutorial or something to build my confidence
I've torn down and rebuilt a few notebooks but have not done a thermal pastie

 

I haven't, but he has!

 

thanks Midnight

 

does someone try undervolting in windows 8?