Undervolting on laptops.

I think most higher-end gaming laptop companies already do some form of undervolting at the factory production line, AFAIK they apply a reasonable safe voltage that will work on all laptops and generate less heat,  then test them to make sure. Although it is a good idea on a personal level, most people aren't that confident in such things and so there isn't much market for it. Also I get a lot of weirdness with undervolting things so I just tend to stay away from it for good measure.

MSI are continuing with afterburner development and maintenance themselves now, they seem to have parted ways with the Developer concerned.

Thats good to know.

Tbh, I wish the undervolting aspect of it was less of a faf.

I stopped using it because it glitched out and even when not running it it kept pinging my CPU and GPU. Spent and entire day wondering what the hell was going on. Was a ballache to remove it and reset all drivers to stop it from doing it. :(

Thats the thing with undervolting, its luck of the draw. If you get a HX or HS chip from AMD it normally runs similar voltages. I was chatting to a guy on reddit who undervolted his Strix AE about 30mv with UAFB and managed to use PBO/XFR to get higher peaks too. All stable. Yet my 6800H didn't like a 10mv reduction.

It's kinda like overclocking, you have to do it bit by bit and stress test it. If you get lucky, you can get some gains. If not then you're stuck at stock.

Some OEMs do, Lenovo had the hidden advanced BIOS and MSI do a full proper BIOS. I get it on budget laptops there's not much point as they're likely bottom bins, but the high end of mid tier and high tier laptops should offer more IMO.

Ragnaraz said:

Who wouldn't?

Well, people who don't have the knowledge about clocking or those that fear they might damage their laptops. To some, that's advanced knowledge.

Some people just don't care enough to bother with it.

Some would even prefer overclocking - I mean, who would underclock their gear? That's for plebs.

I agree there are benefits to it and I would definitely reach out for that if I were saving my battery or doing low-intensity work. Gaming? I'd prefer my laptop to run the games the best it can.

Undervolting and undercloxking are very different things though. Underclocking lowers your clocks and will keep the factory voltage curve. Undervolting aims to keep your clocks the same while using less voltage to do so.

It's very much a luck of the draw thing, if you get a top tier piece of silicon in terms of lottery, you could say drop 20/30mv reduce your temps and keep your frequency the same.

With Ryzen chips, if you're lucky you can use that as a core offset then PBO will see if it can squeeze a higher frequency at the same maximum voltage. So normal frequencies use less voltage and save power, but then if you're using everything it has the the ceiling it will take those 20/30mv and raise the frequency ceiling.

I get its not for novices, but if you want to optimise your gear then its an awesome option to have.

I don't see why some sort of utility to give access to it would even need to be that complicated.

We already have things like battery saver and performance modes, why not let people fine tune things a little bit more?
Modern processors have safeties that make it difficult to brick them anyway.

It would likely just crash, then reboot at last safe voltage. Or even if you needed to remove the CMOS battery, the settings go back to stock.

Just gives the chance of better temps, longer life and in some cases more performance/ more consistent performance.