How to Undervolt Your Laptop So It Runs Cooler, Faster, and Longer

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?

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. By undervolting your processor, you’ll lower the pressure with which electrons flow, effectively lowering waste heat by reducing the amount of energy going into the processor in the first place.

Unlike some other power restriction methods, such as changing the power scheme in Windows, undervolting won’t slow your computer down. 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 as thermal throttling.

By undervolting your laptop, you can reach faster performance and significantly better battery life without sacrificing performance. However, without enough electrons flowing through a processor to make its components work, you may get some instability. 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. It’s somewhat similar to running out of battery — your laptop doesn’t get the electricity it needs to function and shuts down without warning. After turning your laptop back on, the device will revert to default settings, assuming you didn’t configure automatic undervolting on startup.

Don’t confuse undervolting with overvolting, which is precisely what it sounds admire. Overvolting should only be done by pros who know what they’re doing and want to overclock. If you give your laptop more voltage than it can handle, the CPU, motherboard, and other components can turn into e-waste in a matter of months or even seconds.

How to Undervolt Your Laptop CPU With ThrottleStop

While you can adjust voltages on your laptop a few different ways, the easiest method for Intel-powered machines is with ThrottleStop. For AMD-powered laptops, you can use the Ryzen Controller to lower the temperature limit for an automatic undervolt. If that doesn’t work, use the Universal x86 Tuning Utility to create a custom voltage curve, as shown in this video.

Now, let’s get back to Intel CPUs. After downloading ThrottleStop, unzip it into a new folder. You don’t have to install the program — just run it directly. You’ll get a warning prompt when you launch it for the first time. Click “OK.”

You’ll then be greeted by the ThrottleStop menu, where you’ll click on “FIVR.” FIVR stands for “Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator,” and it controls the voltage rails on Intel CPUs.

To make sure your voltage settings don’t reset every time you open Throttlestop, click on “OK – Save Voltages Immediately.” 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.” This means that your laptop will continue to dynamically change the voltage based on the default voltage curve minus the offset you’ve set.

Undervolting requires some trial and error until you find the sweet spot where your computer won’t crash during heavy workloads. For now, let’s undervolt the CPU by an offset of 100 mV (millivolts) by adjusting the “Offset Voltage” slider to -100 and hitting “Apply.”

If your system didn’t crash immediately, that’s a sign that the undervolt is stable, but we’ll do more stability tests later. If it did crash, reopen Throttlestop and repeat the same process but set the “Offset Voltage” to a lower value, such as -50 mV. The next step is to undervolt the “CPU Cache” by selecting it under FIVR Control and doing the same steps as before.

You can keep repeating this same process over and over until you find the optimal settings for your laptop. assess after each adjustment by running the built-in TS Bench tool to see whether it crashes. To do that, close the FIVR section by clicking “OK,” then click on “TS Bench.” A new side window for TS Bench will show up, where you can click “Start” to begin the stress assess.

If you don’t get any errors in TS Bench, and if the computer doesn’t crash, your system is stable. If it does crash, you need to advocate reduce your undervolt, or you’ll risk constantly crashing and potentially losing work progress.

If you want to change the voltage by more than 125 mV, select a higher “Range” value underneath the slider. Some processors can get to -200 mV or even lower.

You may have noticed that there’s also an “Intel GPU” option (and “iGPU Unslice” on some models). Use this to undervolt the integrated GPU using similar parameters to lower the laptop’s temperatures even advocate. Note that if you have the “iGPU Unslice” option available, you have to set it to the same “Offset Voltage” as the “Intel GPU.”

So there you have it! After just 15 minutes of tinkering, you’ll see significantly better all-round performance on your laptop while keeping it icy chill.

To make sure you’ve successfully undervolted your CPU, you can run a stress assess tool admire Prime95 and monitor your CPU temperature with Core Temp. Try running before and after tests by closing ThrottleStop and restarting your system to eradicate the undervolt. Your undervolt was successful if you see lower temps when ThrottleStop is running.