Can undervolting damage a laptop? - General Discussions

RE: Can undervolting damage a laptop?

Guest 10344 — Sat, 22 Oct 2022 03:07:45 +0000

When we refer to undervolting we are talking about undervolting either the processor/CPU and/or the GPU. It has not bearing or effect on peripherals like HDD. motherboard, CD drive etc. They will continue to get the same voltage as required by the specs.

Undervolting a prrocessor is a good way to reduce power consumption and make for a silent cooling solution. It can also be argued that it can increase the life of your processor and motherboard. Undervolting will not physically damage any of your components, but it can make it unstable, in the sense that it can cause your PC to crash/BSOD. This BSOD/power cycling happening repeatedly could lead data corruption, hard disk failure etc.

Undervolting like overclocking is an art form and finding the sweet spot of the offset voltage that gives you max benefits with min reduction in performance is not easy. This is also because this is very much dependent on the batch of silicon that was used to prepare the processor. For eg: you could take 2 Intel i5-8300H CPUs and you will find one of them undervolts only upto 50mV whereas the other one undervolts successfully to 200mv.

I would strongly recommend to NOT do this on any machine that hosts critical data or services.

I came across 2 articles on the same that i liked, adding them for your reference

How to undervolt a CPU: Complete guide to undervolting

What Is Undervolting a GPU or CPU, and When Should You Do It?

RE: Can undervolting damage a laptop?

Learning Electronics — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 22:47:40 +0000

@jrrdwyahoo-com thank you for the clarification though I'm still confused a bit. If the pc is under-volted would it not have enough Volts or Potential to start up or turn on to begin with or will it still start up and damage parts like the Hard Drive?

Thank you again for the clarification, I'm currently learning all about these components and how they work.

RE: Can undervolting damage a laptop?

Guest 9996 — Sun, 02 Oct 2022 10:20:44 +0000

There are 2 things / situations that I can think of "undervolting" will hurt electronics is if it has a motor or you're not using enough 'volts' to complete the circuit.

Examples: 1. If you're PC has a mechanical hard drive, CD Rom or DVD drives you could damage those.

2. Being as how all most everything on a PCB operates on DC not using enough voltage might stop solid state components from working properly.

RE: Can undervolting damage a laptop?

Learning Electronics — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 16:07:33 +0000

Hello and nice to meet you, what a really good question. I've never heard of undervolting so I'm glad I came across this post. I also have never heard of the ThrottleStop 9.5 application. I have heard of overclocking the cpu/gpu for both gaming and mining rigs so I would assume that it has something to do with lowering the voltage of the component which if what I've learned is correct would have no damaging affects other than to slow down, reduce heat, decrease in the components over all output I guess. This forum is a wealth of information and knowledge I'm so glad to be here.

RE: Can undervolting damage a laptop?

Guest 9646 — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 05:27:41 +0000

no damage should not be .

RE: Can undervolting damage a laptop?

Guest 9571 — Sun, 21 Aug 2022 04:43:25 +0000

as long as the chip is stable there should be no issues. running undervolts will aid in keeping the component cooler which will actually increase the life of the component as adrsvcs has mentioned in their post

RE: Can undervolting damage a laptop?

Abrsvcs — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 12:35:01 +0000

Either overvoltage or overclocking will result in the generation of additional heat during operation. If there is any problem with removing that heat, the CPU will get damaged rather quickly. It all comes down to heat. CPUs are designed to run at certain maximum speeds. Running higher than that risks errors in general as well as internal capacitance starts to become an issue. I would suggest caution and at the very least additional cooling to lengthen the time before failure.

Dan

Can undervolting damage a laptop?

Stefan — Sat, 23 Jul 2022 18:18:31 +0000

Hello, I have an HP omen 15 with an Intel i5-8300H processor and I did undervolt with the ThrottleStop 9.5 program.Everything works stably and without any problems, but I'm wondering if undervolt can damage the laptop in the long run.These are the values I set: CPU Core -150mv, CPU Cache -150mv, Igpu Unslice -40mv, Intel GPU -40mv.