Tweaking a CPU for power efficiency: Underclocking vs Undervolting vs Eco mode
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ต.ค. 2022
- I compare many different ways of tweaking a CPU to increase efficiency and lower power consumption to see what methods work best for which use cases.
- วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
The energy prices are making everyone looking for a way to reduce power consumption. Good insights and video. Btw, despite not a fan of Apple, apple silicon at 20w seems like a product for this scenario.
I'm fine with power consumption (well, not really but for now at least my bills don't change) but heat is the real problem. My current PC farts out just under 600W when not idle. It literally turns room into a sauna on a moderate day and in the summer it's uninhabitable oven wasteland. Opening window works only in autumn and winter - as a matter of fact, since I run my PC 24/7, right now I have window tilt-opened and heating off and room is toasty in British climate (cold and wet). After next hardware upgrade I will need to think about putting PC into a grow tent with exhaust pipe going directly out of the window with a decent vent fan to push the air out, I see no other solution. Installing AC is out of question, the power draw would be through the roof (not to mention it would be like running a fan heater in AC room, good recipe to make it die quickly with that constant "casual" 800W fighting against it...)
Exactly what I was looking for, thank you so much!
Great work. well thought out. Thanks for sharing. i have an old Dell Optiplex Sandybridge 2400s. im going set it in the sun and heat soak test this summer
Fun fact. I have a Deepcool Assassin 3 and Corsair 5000D Airflow with a Core i7-12700K paired with an Z690 Pro A DDR5 motherboard.
For some reason, the motherboard was giving 1.42 volts to the CPU and it was reaching 90 degrees instantly on Cinebench R23, i did an undervolt that thing to 1.23 volts on average, power consumption dropped from 230 watts (lmao) to 150 watts, now 67 degrees C.
Multicore perfomance hasn't changed, but singlethread did (with a partial OC with the undervolt).
I wonder if buying a better motherboard of a BIOS update could fix the absurd voltages for stock.
Iddle power draw is 5 watts (Big-Little chip). i5-13600K is even better (3 watts).
If you are a gamer or casual user, Eco Mode could save you a bit of money on power bills in the long run, if your motherboard has it as a feature. Another thing you can do on AMD Ryzen systems is lower the maximum power and current available to the chip, which more or less does the same thing but requires more technical know-how (even my low end Asus board can do this).
Also, there are ways to prevent the CPU from boosting in Windows. I set my Ryzen 3600 to boost only up to 4 GHz and it cuts down maximum temperatures by about ten degrees celsius, with very little performance loss. It also hurts multicore performance less than Eco mode.
Man i love your videos
Super helpful info. Thanks!
Gotta love the "Molex to Sata loose all your data" cable you got there, also what GPU you got hooked up there? anything over 225W? if yes might want to look into running dual 8-pins from the PSU instead running it on a single daisychained cable.
Yes that wiring was a temp setup for my install used for testing. Normally I’m booting from a m.2 drive. I got a gtx 1080 in there. I should run 2 cables as it’s better but its a fairly low power compared to some of the newer GPUs coming out and it’s really only used for video editing these days.
I undervolt my 5800X from Windows when it was on bare metal, would you know how to undervolt that in proxmox?
Undercooking helps. When you game only then normal clock and also temp are too low then normal.
My storage system is a 200W heater for the winter. No idea what I will do with it in Summer probably shred the whole thing data and all.
Woot! New vid. What's the hot take on running your PSU below optimal load when doing this? IIRC you lose PSU efficiency when not running it at about 50% max load.
Depends on the quality. The higher tier 80 plus ratings have good efficiency at low loads.
I haven't run any exact numbers, so this is just an estimate from reviews I have seen. Most of the time a PSUs efficiency is within a few percentage points at the medium loads of roughly 20-80%. There is unlikely to be a large performance difference between a 500w and a 1000w psu for example. A PSU only seems to have a very large drop off in efficiency is very low loads, like less than 10% of the rated max power. Using a 1000w PSU for a system that maxes out at 50w would likely be a good amount worse than a 100w PSU. I'd like to run a test like this in the future and see what numbers I get in my own testing.
@@ElectronicsWizardry Titanium level is required to be 90% at 10% load, none of the lower levels require a 10% load to be rated.
That being said, if you're making a high end psu it's unlikely to be bad at low load e en if you don't specifically need to meet a requirement.
Useful video. I have an ASRock Rack X570D4U board arriving soon so I will be interested to see what settings it lets me tweak.
I'm in the same boat here. Mine just arrived the other day, still haven't decided on the CPU.
I have the x470 version of that board. I put a 3900x in it but a 5000 series would likely be a better pick today. I put this system in a collocation with a 200w power limit so I didn’t care about idle power but needed to keep max power down. I used pbo settings so it would still boost to the max clock speeds for light loads but limit max power draw. If idle and light load power is more important lowering clocks and voltages would likely help more.
Good test
I'm thinking of disabling all cores and HT except 2 or four, then OC two cores to 5GHz and make them run 100% with low latency tweaks for near real time latencies...
I switched on the curve optimizer for my 5900X with minus 30 points.
gj dude!
I had an idea to build an ultra low tdp system to work as a Proxmox server with 15 VMs on Ryzen 5950x. Does it make sense to do it with Ryzen 5950 (undervolt)? Will I get 20 watt in idle? Is it possible to set up limit in 35-45 watts (or 65 in worst case) or cpu will take more tdp when each core has some load?
I don't think a 5950x would get to 20w idle with VMs running. The 5000 series chips had a somewhat power hungry io die, that seems to be much improved in the 7000 series. Also if you chose to use a x570 motherboard, the chipset uses a good amount of power too. The power consumption of a CPU also goes a good amount from a fully loaded desktop to a light load, so Id guess a 10w jump at least as the cores will need to much much less time in the very low power c states.
I was sitting at about 60w idle on my 5950x system, but that did have a gtx 1080 that would use a good amount more power than something like a gt 710. I also have a x570 taichi, which has a fairly power hungry chipset on it.
I'd like to do more testing on this in the future to see how low of power consumption you can get with a modern CPU and light server loads.
@@ElectronicsWizardry
Thank you for your answer.
I have a Lenovo tiny pc i5 8400t (6 cores, 35w) it consumes 7-8 idle with 3 Ubuntu VM (Proxmox).
It seems if I want to make a proxmox server with 16 cores and low tdp I have to use a few mini PCs with Intel CPU (8400t, 9700t, etc.).
Also, I read that Intel 12 Gen (eco cores) are not supported in Proxmox yet :(
So we don't have a single Intel CPU (with low tdp) with 16 cores for Proxmox at this point.
"a x570 taichi"
I did see some reviews and it seems b550 can be enough with good VRM
"I'd like to do more testing on this in the future to see how low of power consumption you can get with a modern CPU and light server loads."
yep, this is an interesting topic
@@MoFlol I am trying to get my hands on a 12th or 13th gen CPU to test the P and E cores in Proxmox and see how it works and the power consumption. I'd also like to get my hands on some ryzen 7000 chips to see how they work. I'd guess they will be better than 5000 due to the lower power io die and onboard graphics so you don't need a GPU for server uses.
I believe much of the additional power consumption my desktop has is due to the motherboard. The dell Optiplex boards have little extra features that consume power. Gaming boards have many extra chips for rgb, audio, usb, and more. All of these chips take a little bit of power which can add up at idle.
@@ElectronicsWizardry Thanks. I plan a new AMD 7000 system and would like to optimize its IDLE power consumption because I don't game so much but use the PC mostly for programming, web surfing and other light workloads... Some BIOS settings guide for IDLE power optimization would be very appreciated.
Not sure which C-states the new Ryzen 7000 CPUs & motherboards support.
I undervolted my i7-11800h by -0,075mv core,cache,system agent
Downclocked the 4,2ghz to 4,0ghz (no fps difference between 3-5 degrees less) in resident evil 4 (chapter 5) the cpu temp is 70 degrees most of the time and max 75
I'm using an FX-6350 on a low end chipset board just for TrueNAS. I'd like the PC to be as quiet as can be, and it ain't :D Can I just turn down the frequency to like 2.0GHz and call it a day?
I’d give that a try as it’s likely your best option on that platform. But the issue with those older chips is a lot of the power is from the chipset so even if the cpu is off the chipset is still making a reasonable amount of heat.
@@ElectronicsWizardry The board is a 760GM-P34 (FX), and yes the chipset heats up a lot, so I've already got a small fan on top of the northbridge heatsink. Still the CPU cooler is causing most of the noise, so I'll try just downclocking, thanks.
xxDrain also check the fan control settings. I’d try turning down the fan speed if you have thermal headroom.
@1:14 the ECO mode would be for laptops that use the desktop chips but require a lower thermal operating envelope.
Completely incorrect. ECO mode is just a PBO profile.
Normally PBO tweaks the power curves and TDP to maximize performance at the cost of higher voltage/heat.
However, since it is just running a power profile, AMD created some profiles that optimize for efficiency instead.
You can use these to lock the CPU at a lower power target, and end up getting MUCH higher efficiencies, since high-end CPUs are usually tuned to the bleeding edge of performance so they don't "lose" to competitors slightly higher numbers.
As an example, you can lock a 7950 to 105W, which saves about 20% power usage, and it only loses about 3-5% performance.
AMD Ryzen G-Series are kings of efficiency. My 5700G at stock setting idles at 3 Watts. You can confirm this by watching @TechNotice's 5700G videos
I love your videos and what you are doing, hands down. But bro, you need a haircut, some sunlight ...and a clean shave 😂 Would work wonders
pick the right chip for your needs
on most platforms you won't notice undervolting but you really need a killawatt and record daily and weekly usage and performance
for smb applications they can take advantage of running a few things on sbc/arm platforms or 6/7th gen or 10th gen refurbs
the newer platforms allow concurrent use of gpu/nvme and 100g - biz calculus is still mixed - use newer platforms for better low idle options but use older platforms too and max them out to full potential before worrying too much about overall power usage - be smart and savvy, make informed choices and for overall stability best stay within specs - stability is more important than saving 10 watts - the user has to test best setups and lean green when possible #reduce, reuse, and recycle #nvme carbon footprint adbantage #consolidated yet federated and distributed
Why is this guy on my fyp with 310 views ???
Double the views a week later now. I’ve actually been looking at the idle power of the new CPU’s and how to reduce noise so it was a very relevant video for me.