Talk:Underclocking

Underclocking competitions?

 * Who knows, but I'll tender my entry now :) Acer NoteLite 350, originally a gonad-scorching P120 (with the option of a P133 O_O), will happily underclock to 75... 66... 60... 50mhz... even 33 if you're committed to energy saving! I found 60 to be a good compromise, made a tired battery run a lot longer and stopped my thighs from cooking, without sacrificing very much performance; basically the system bus, memory etc are still at the same speed, just the CPU has the clock doubler removed. Occasionally clocked it up (66, 75) when having to run something more demanding, but not often. It's telling of how overpowered todays machines are (and how inefficient the code) that I was 'happily' (well, ok, it's only got a VGA rez LCD..) using it for MS Office applications (inc powerpoint and access!) for college this time last year; it's 800/1733mhz replacement was only bought in March (and spends most of it's time at 800mhz unless i'm running the one modern application i have that benefits from high CPU speed, and is worth the considerable increase in heat, power consumption and fan noise, i.e. 25-30 watts vs 8-12w and no fan vs fan at 50% of its alarmingly powerful maximum... that app is folding@home, a HEAVY number crunching distributed computing effort).


 * It's not the only one to have 'secret' low speed modes (50, 33 etc) either. I have a P-133 desktop that has a WORKING turbo switch (rare on a pentium!) that dropkicks the CPU to 33mhz - and I reckon it would do 25 if I lowered the bus to 50mhz (p75 mode). Also there's a website out there, a german one whose name I forget (I think you link to it via the OS Museum though) where they appear to be having a competition that's a variation on/requires innovative use of underclocking - "how wimpy a computer can you get each version of windows to run on?". The winner so far has managed to boot Windows XP (after waiting around for a couple hours..) on a machine with 20mb RAM... and an 8 - yes, 8 - mhz Pentium. Acheived by finding a secret 20mhz mode, then also discovering that unplugging the cooling fan from the motherboard triggered another secret emergency switch dropping the entire system to ISA bus speed (which, at 7.87mhz, was occasionally reported as "7mhz" by various programs). Hardcore, and a legendary effort - especially as any troubleshooting would have been a labourious affair, with some windows taking a full minute just to draw. They also found that with careful optimising, an 8mhz 386 (16mhz with turbo off) and 8mb will just about run Win98 SE (so why does my Duron 1600 make such a hash of it?), and an Athlon-64 with 1gb of memory gives Win 3.1 such a headache it will only run in "Standard" (aka 286) mode...


 * Ah the fun you can have with a bit of surrepitous circuit bending :-D
 * -tahrey 20/1/07

Rewrite of performance sections
Rewrite of the sections/sentences dealing with performance to better reflect the fact that, while you will lose performance, the loss is generally not as big as you might expect. DaanS 11:18, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Also removing the statement about faster access to RAM. The reasoning provided does not seem plausible to me, and I haven't been able to find any resources that back the statement. DaanS 11:24, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Merger proposal
The result was merge DOWNCLOCKING into UNDERCLOCKING. -- Sin Harvest (talk) 07:24, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Is there really any point in the artlce downclocking. Its the same thing and underclocking and as such should be merged into this one. Simply by having a phrase like - Underclocking (also known as downclocking) is... blah blah) - That way the downclocking page can be turned into a redirect to the underclocking page Cabe6403 10:59, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

I think that would be fine, so I second that idea. AdamTheWebMan 22:59, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

I third that idea, having seperate articles is not very effective —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.236.253.250 (talk) 11:31, 5 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Agree Should be merged - don't see any problems. Ziphon 10:38, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

I think the next person who can merge (knows how to) should do so. Pandawelch (talk) 05:48, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I'll give the merging a shot --Sin Harvest (talk) 07:13, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Other reasons to underclock
The article fails to mention that there are other reasons why you'd want to underclock the CPU. Sometimes older software (e.g. 3D games) won't run properly unless the CPU is underclocked. I remember Unreal (released in 1998) having a lot of weird issues when played on my AMD Phenom II X4 965 on Linux via WINE when it was running at the stock 3.4GHz, but ran normally after I underclocked it to 800MHz. I'm going to post this both here and in the dynamic frequency scaling article. 24.131.27.231 (talk) 14:29, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

another major reason is in pro gaming. while overclocking is more known due to squezing more juice out of older equip (more bang for your buck as you were) several gamers in semi pro circles will often underclock a power box. the effect allows for a larger range of games to play and while forcing the base system to run at less resources can severly cut fps and lag on high end games while simultaniously freeing resources to essentially become a LPB (low ping bastard a common gaming slang). while not the best method it has lead many gamers to rethink there equipment and play smarter not faster to get the best scores. at most lan cafes there are normally fps tourns/expos run in which a under/over and regular pc of the exact same build are put against each other by the top 3 players in the played game. while players skill can affect the outcome it oftern is a good measure at how close/far certain builds are when tweaked wisely. 152.91.9.153 (talk) 08:32, 28 August 2011 (UTC)

Coprocessor underclocking
As I want to upgrade my very old Compaq LTE 386s/20 laptop running at 20MHz with a matching math coprocessor. I found that the coprocessor 80387SX-25 is much cheaper and more available than the slower 80387SX-20, but as far I can read from internet discussions a faster coprocessor will work fine and just run at the same speed as the main processor. I think if this information is correct that the use of a faster coprocessor should be mentioned in this article. --SimonGjer (talk) 03:19, 4 July 2019 (UTC)

Mac?
Why does it list random OSs including Linux and Asus eee but not Mac OS X? Patrick03:35, 30 November 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.5.253.125 (talk)

Arduino?
Underclocking is a big deal in low energy and BLE applications. A section would be a good idea. futurebird (talk) 03:14, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

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