Greetings chums, happy Friday! I'm planning to use my i7 rig for occasional media streaming and fileserving, at which point it'll be running all day and night with no "manual" intervention. I currently run a modest 3.2Ghz overclock for extra performance in games, video work, etc... however I'd like to go the opposite way to reduce power consumption and heat when the rig is in "server" mode. Has anyone tried this? I'd be very grateful for recommendations in dropping clocks, voltages, memory timings and allsorts to make the PC as cool, quiet and efficient as possible. Many thanks in advance, Cleggy.
I do it all the time, if I'm gone for the weekend or whatever and know I'm not going to be using it, I'll restart and underclock by a lot. I usually underclock to about 1Ghz on my Q6600 to save not only power but to reduce excess heat. Then when I get back, I'll restart and set it to it's original clock speed
I couldn't really give you any particular voltages etc, but I'd start by just quite simply reducing the CPU multiplier and baseclock, try drop it down to say 1.5ghz for starters, if that works just fine then try dropping it some more - I'm not sure about voltages though. Probably could underclock the RAM too - just lowest settings, if it's too slow then just bump up. One thing which is worth while doing is using your overclocking profiles on your motherboard, I assume it will have that feature anyways. So you could have one saying "Gaming" or "Performance" and then one for that. My i5 750 automatically underclocks when not needing that much power - general browsing etc. So if your PC is idol it will probably underclock itself anyways. Another thing worth trying is trying to set up different overclocking profiles for your graphics card so you can have that underclocked too.
Fun to try on my 4870, seeing how much i can drop the voltage and stay at stock speeds. Personally I would start by pulling down vcore in small steps with the cpu at default speed, with 20 mins of Linpack after each change just to quickly check stability. Then 4 hours of it to when you think youve gone as low as you can go. Its voltage more than anything that makes up power consumption, and unless your on sub zero cooling a certain lump of voltage will be required to just make the silicone work so you'll find your minimum voltage might be good for 1.8 ghz or something with no reason to underclock further. I'd shoot for default speeds or a teeensy weensy bit under and just try and pull down all the voltages around it.
