undervolting/underclock first-level gpu state

im wondering if say undeclocking the lowest clocks for the 9800m GT by say 50mhz and lowering the voltage by .10 would be a good idea to up battery life a bit... anyone know if there would be some limiting voltage and/or clock speed limit to allow for basic powersaver-esque performance? would underclocking/undervolting just cause the gpu to jump up to the next level and make the change counter-productive? otherwise i think it's a good idea. 'preciate any feedback

 

I was wondering the same but since I rarely use mine away from an outlet, I wasn't curious enough to try when I did my overclock. It makes sense tho.

 

I'm running my 9800M GTX at 200/300/100 @ .7v with no stabiliy issues. Increases battery life about 20-30 minutes. Very well worth it.

 

Hmmm, I may try this...

So no "problems" Mike?

 

I occasionally run into problems when I'm running @ .7 with the clocks down to 200/300/100 when waking from sleep, but this is easily remedied by leaving the shaders at 400. doesn't happen too often.

 

How do you lower the voltages again?

 

NiBiToR. Make sure you get the version released today. Then jump into the voltage section and take er down!

 

im trying 175/400/100 @ 0.7 on my 9800m gt and seems fine so far...

 

testing the battery drain with light-moderate usage (multiple web page browsing on wireless, watching some videos stored by the HDD, workin in flash a bit, etc.) still have 30% left while im writing this and based on the time i started i should get 2hrs 15min at this rate..lookin good.

 

hmm.. I already get 2.5 hours in silent mode/power saver... so if I were to flash the card with lower low power clocks/volts I'd probably be able to push 3 hours.

Sounds like a new experiment to me.

 

aye i wasn't in silent and the video decoding pushed gpu to max clocks/power consumption. Im sure one could push 3hrs doing bare minimum stuff...i was rending like 1gig video/audio in flash too...so that's impressive time.

 

In my experiments with the M570RU, I hit 3 1/2 hours. The M570TU I use now uses less power overall. Once I get to dropping the voltage of the CPU, we'll see if I can't hit 4 hours.

 

Pretty impressive, keep us updated about that...

 

Quick question...when I try to read the BIOS into NiBiTor, I get an error saying unrecognized BIOS...what do I do there?

 

read the bios with gpuz - use the chip button next to the bios version, then load that into nibitor.

Make sure to save a copy of the original bios as .rom in case you need to reflash it at any point (gpuz uses .bin which is not compatible with nvflash)

 

It would be great if some one could post the lowes clocks and voltages they could get working well.

 

Im running .7 / .75 / .9 / 1.03 volts with my idle clock set to 150core

 

I tried this before on my old m570ru's, it works great while your just browsing, but I started having problems when games would launch or close. I would just recommend lowering the clocks and not messing with the voltages.

 

Well, with max screen intensity and RMClock , I managed to get 2 hours browsing the internet...and med mode forced on my older RU.
I wonder how much I would`ve got by lowering the clocks and the voltages on the 7950GTX, since that used 45W ...

 

I have managed it working well,tested with games@ voltages 0.7/0.75/0.85/1(No OC).
Trying to keep same clocks and voltages for 2D and Thrtl causes system to hang.Idle temps at 44for GPU and CPU is 32.That's the best so far I have managed.

 

So I tried saving the bios with GPU-Z but I still get the error when I read it into NiBiTor. The error is : "The current BIOS device ID is unknown to NiBiTor. To work with this BIOS now, you can select the generation which you think fits your card's BIOS. NiBiTor will then interpret it as a BIOS of this generation." The dropdown menu options are "GeForceFX Series, GeForce6 Series, GeForce7 Series, and GeForce8 Series"

 

Thats because nibitor doesnt support the 9 series yet. if you change the device id (under advanced info) to that of an 8800 series card and click rescan bios then it'll read the data properly, then when youve made the changes, put the dev id back to what it was, rescan it and then save it.

 

Is there a software clock/voltage control for GPUs like RMClock?

 

Nope. vBIOS is the only way.

 

Did some simple battery tests after undervolting the GPU and running RMclock for a minimum voltage of 1.0375 at 6x multiplier.

While watching a movie on two brightness my battery life went down 24% in 33 minutes, giving me a theoretical battery life of 137.5 minutes or two hours and 17.5 minutes.

While mildly web browsing on lowest brightness and being on msn afterwards, my battery life was going roughly 1.6 minutes per percent, giving me a theoretical 2 hours and 40 minutes.

Both of these tests are on silent mode, power saver setting. I'm wondering if I were to uninstall and not use my turbo memory module if my battery would go up... hmm.

Oh, just to note, I do have my wireless mouse connected to my computer, so there is a bit of a power draw from one of my USB ports.

 

next thing i need is a 12 cell c'mon clevo....

 

Honestly, these gains arn't all that much. From any testing I've done, I've only gotten maybe 10-20 minutes from undervolting the GPU. I assumed that I would get more.

 

even still 20min > 0min especially when you don't have to panic during a 2hr class cause your battery is ~10% and instead more at 25% when the class is finished

...i still want a 12 cell battery.

 

Hmm. Is there any recourse if you use too low a voltage and it locks up on booting or if you have a bad flash? There's no booting from a spare video card and then reflashing, unless maybe you have an SLI notebook? I've gotten my desktop to fail to POST on several occasions - as heart-stopping as it was, it was easy enough to just reset the CMOS.

I do wish the M860TU had its battery at the back, giving the buyer a choice of battery size. For those who prefers aesthetics, they can go for a flush battery, and those who want mobility and don't care about a sticking out battery can go for a large battery.

 

If you mess up your card and it fails to boot, you can simply do a blind flash with your original bios and should be just fine.

 

the thing is...the 8 cell they provide is only 4400mAh (i think im going by memory) which is incredibly low for an 8 cell...they could feasibly fit another cell in their and maybe more in the little hollow plastic bottom piece on the battery with the round rubber foot...i'm thinking they could easily produce a battery pushing 4hrs to dead.

 

Yeah I was wondering about that as well... couldn't they easily have done a higher milliamp batt? And yes, you're right, it is 4400mAh (I'm looking at the batt right now)

 

They use eight 3.7V cells, each one at 2200 mah. (At least they do on the M570TU)

 

if they'd offer a higher capacity battery i'd be first in line, and i'd imagine that'd be a very long line...maybe we should create a petition to clevo (unless maybe sager could do something about it?) lol I just feel the m860tu is a really efficient laptop with a great potential for a long runtime.

 

Problem is that you simply can't fit a bigger capacity battery at that little space. Each cell is already 3.7V@2200mah, which is pretty much the limit for todays cells.

 

That's simply not true, newer laptops are getting batteries with nearly 2500mah per cell so it's very possible and i'm thinking a lot of us would pay the premium for more mobile time...

 

Yea, but then again the 2500mah cells are larger than the 2200mah cells...(in physical size)

 

There's got to be a way

 

Its possible. People have been doing it for years. Pop open your battery pack and look at the ID for the battery, then search online and you'll very likely find a higher capacity version. Probably much cheaper overall too then replacing a whole battery pack. Just solder the new packs in! They will be the same size, much like there are 2100mAh AA batteries, and 2600mAh batteries. Same size, some just better than others.

 

AA batteries are only 1.2 volts (for a rechargeable) at a max of 2500mAh (that's the highest I've seen anyway). The reason they can be so small is because their voltage is small as well. When you start doing 3.7v on a 2100mAh battery, they start getting to be about the same size as a 'C' sized battery, if not a little bit bigger.


Having said that though, a quick google did find me some 2600mAh 3.7v cells. Are they the same size? I have no idea, since I don't feel like tampering with my laptop batt to find the size of the cells.

 

http://www.newworldvideodirect.com/productdetail.asp?productid=3117&refid=froogle

2700mAh and from one of the best battery companies in the world

There are always more powerful batteries when you look for them.

 

But the voltage is only 1.2 volts...You need cells with 3.7V

 

Well right. Just saying that there are always higher amperage batteries on the market. And pointing out that 2500 mAh batteries were not the highest amperage.

 

Yes, but the 2500mah cells are physically bigger than the 2200mah cells used in the M560TU laptop. So they still wouldn't fit, and you would still need a bigger battery package for 2500mah cells instead of the 2200mah cells.

Which really brings us back to the start of the discussion lol...

 

No, if the cells are bigger, they are the wrong cells. If somebody can get the cell information, I'll find you some better cells. I'm not wanting to rip apart my battery right now...