Notebooks Practice Reviews

Undervolting on Intel Laptops in 2020: this is what you need to know! | XMG Support

As a rule of thumb, we have imposed an upper limit of -120mV on our undervolting options in the BIOS in previous years. This limit was generally considered safe. Safe in the sense that under certain circumstances blue screens might already appear at the lowest setting, but there was little to no risk of running into a ‘no boot’ scenario.

This worked so well that some XMG models already had a factory voltage offset of -50mV by default. This value was not a black box but could be tuned further (or reset to 0) by the user in the BIOS. With this -50mV Factory Undervolting (CPU Core/Uncore Voltage Offset) we shipped thousands of laptops without creating a single support case.

New rules: Comet Lake (10th Gen) seems to have less headroom

Now with the 10th generation Intel Core the situation seems to have changed. Based on our testing, it looks like 10th Gen generation has much less headroom for Undervolting – maybe because they are already well-tuned by default. In a number of large-scale tests together with our ODM, we have determined the following case numbers:

In other words:

  • When switching from Coffee Lake to Comet Lake, the failure rate at -50mV has gone from zero to 5%.
  • With our previous limit of -120mV we had no serious problems with Coffee Lake, but with Comet Lake we can create a “no boot” scenario very reliably

5% failure rate in the test with 100 devices means: 5% of the laptops produced at least one blue screen in idle or 3DMark. If the test is continued for a longer period of time, possibly over several weeks, this rate might slightly increase. So even a value of -50mV, previously considered moderate, is not an all-round carefree package. You have to test it on each individual system.

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