There is, however, one reason why low-power laptop users might want to avoid this kind of trick. If I can nearly triple a machine’s battery life by aggressive throttling and voltage changes, I can easily believe a 30-50 percent improvement just from disabling Turbo Boost. The reason I’m bringing it up is to demonstrate that the 30-50 percent battery life improvement that Marco Ament is talking about isn’t a crazy claim. To hit that target, I’m throttling the CPU to within an inch of its life by using XTU to lower the 7700HQ’s default voltage and IccMax. I want to be very clear here: I’m not just disabling Turbo Boost to get that kind of improvement. I wish I had a formal benchmark to show - like Marco, I don’t - but I have timed the actual run-time I got on an airplane while watching movies, and clocked it as just short of six hours, compared to a little over two for the standard configuration.
Why do I bother? Because it virtually triples the runtime I get out of the laptop when watching video or doing basic desktop work, and the amount of time I gain is orders of magnitude larger than the time I spend waiting on the PC (the lag is detectable, but it’s well under a second).
I can write stories or alt-tab between a document and a PDF to make slides and I can still play movies and TV shows flawlessly, but it’s not particularly useful for anything else. I’m not even going to pretend that the user experience is good in this configuration, as the machine is slow enough to visibly lag. When I travel, I’ll often tighten various amperage and power settings until the laptop is locked at 800MHz. You can check the list of supported CPUs for XTU here, but not every chip is listed - the 7700HQ itself, for example, isn’t.Īssuming you have access to XTU and you’re willing to muck around with your laptop’s power configuration (completely at your own risk), you can actually achieve some astonishing improvements at the cost of making a system incredibly slow. Some laptops may also offer UEFI options for adjusting Turbo Boost timing and parameters, though laptop UEFI is typically more locked-down than desktop parts. The advantage of using Intel’s XTU was that I got more granularity to play with the actual Turbo Boost settings, though this utility isn’t supported on every Intel laptop.
I used Intel’s XTU utility for this, but there are other ways to disable Turbo Boost, including programs like Throttlestop. I figured two hours was all you could expect to get out of a gaming laptop, but since I wanted more battery for long flights, I decided to test the impact of changing the Turbo Boost parameters to see what would happen. Video playback was a bit better, but the laptop has a GTX 1060 in it, and GPU-equipped machines always use more power. When new, it got roughly two hours of battery life in normal use. Wa_cq_url: "/content/I have an Alienware R13 from 2016. Wa_audience: "emtaudience:consumer/gamer", Wa_english_title: "What Is Intel® Turbo Boost Technology?", Wa_emtsubject: "emtsubject:consumertechnology/gaming", Wa_emtcontenttype: "emtcontenttype:donotuse/webpage/article",
You don’t need to download or configure anything.
If you’re wondering how to enable Turbo Boost, don’t worry - it’s enabled by default. This can increase performance in both single-threaded and multithreaded applications (programs that utilize several processor cores). Intel® Turbo Boost Technology can potentially increase CPU speeds up to the Max Turbo Frequency while staying within safe temperature and power limits. This is sometimes called “algorithmic overclocking”. But when more speed is needed, Intel® Turbo Boost Technology dynamically increases the clock rate to compensate. Running at a lower clock rate (the number of cycles executed by the processor every second) allows the processor to use less power, which can reduce heat and positively impact battery life in laptops. Intel® Turbo Boost Technology is an energy-efficient solution to this imbalance: it lets the CPU run at its base clock speed when handling light workloads, then jump to a higher clock speed for heavy workloads. Some programs are more dependent on memory to run smoothly, while others are CPU-intensive. How Does Intel® Turbo Boost Technology Work?ĬPUs don’t always need to run at their maximum frequency.