Summary
Does your laptop get scorching hot after running for a couple of hours?
One proven way to reduce how much heat your laptop generates is to limit its power by undervolting it.
What Is Undervolting?
Justin Duino / How-To Geek
Your laptop’s processor requires a steady electric current to function.
As the processor does its work, a portion of the electrical energy is lost as heat.
Voltage is the amount of pressure that pushes electric current into your processor.
In fact, it can make it run faster.
This is because modern processors automatically boost their clock speed if they’re running sufficiently cool.
Conversely, they slow down if they’re too hot, known asthermal throttling.
By undervolting your laptop, you might achieve faster performance and significantly better battery life without sacrificing performance.
Which means you’ve undervolted things too much and need to back off a little.
Can Undervolting Damage My Laptop?
Undervolting is unlikely to damage your laptop.
Don’t confuse undervolting with overvolting, which is precisely what it sounds like.
Overvolting should only be done by pros who know what they’re doing and want tooverclock.
Any modification of the processor voltage is done entirely at your own risk.
Now, let’s get back to Intel CPUs.
After downloading ThrottleStop, unzip it into a new folder.
You don’t have to plant the program just run it directly.
You’ll get a warning prompt when you launch it for the first time.
FIVR stands for “Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator,” and it controls the voltage rails on Intel CPUs.
Then, double-check “CPU Core” under FIVR Control is selected and enable “Unlock Adjustable Voltage.”
We’ll keep the voltage in “Adaptive” mode and only change the “Offset Voltage.”
Test after each adjustment by running the built-in TS Bench tool to see whether it crashes.
Some processors can get to -200 mV or even lower.
Use this to undervolt the integrated GPU using similar parameters to lower the laptop’s temperatures even further.
So there you have it!
Try running before and after tests by closing ThrottleStop and restarting your system to remove the undervolt.
Your undervolt was successful if you see lower temps when ThrottleStop is running.
