Windows Advanced Power Management

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greenep48
Posts: 2
Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2012 1:47 pm

Windows Advanced Power Management

Post by greenep48 » Sun Sep 09, 2012 11:30 am

I am new to PC quieting and just discovered the Windows Advanced Power Management options. No many posts on this subject, so I did some investigating and experimenting with the objective of better CPU fan speed control.

Located at: Control Panel/Power Options/Change Power-Savings Settings/Change Plan Settings/Change Advanced Power Settings/Power Options/Advanced Settings/Processor Power Management (whew!) are the options available for your processor. Earlier processors like my P4 531 (3GHz) have only 1 option, but my i3-2200 has 3 options. The System Cooling Policy is available for both of these processors and seems to be the most effective for CPU fan control.

This option basically decides whether thermal control is by increasing fan speed (Active) or decreasing processor speed (Passive). You might think that using this to reduce the processor speed would be a problem, but for many applications (including HTPC machines) we have way more processor capability than is needed. For example, XBMC playing music reports only 13% CPU utilization on my old P4 3GHz processor, and only 18% playing a DVD.

A quick and easy test of your thermal management configuration is to run the Windows Experience Update while monitoring your temperatures and fan speeds with SpeedFan. Here are my results for my P4 3GHz machine with both the Active and Passive management options:

ACTIVE: 80%-100% CPU utilization (both cores), max CPU temp 74C, max fan speed 4000rpm
PASSIVE: 70%-90% with bursts to 100% CPU utilization (both cores), max CPU temp 70C, max fan speed 3150rpm

So the PASSIVE option reduced the maximum fan speed by more than 20%!

Unfortunately, INTEL won't let you underclock their processors to reduce power even more - oh well!

boost
Posts: 661
Joined: Wed Jul 12, 2006 10:29 am
Location: de_DE

Re: Windows Advanced Power Management

Post by boost » Wed Oct 10, 2012 1:07 am

greenep48 wrote:Unfortunately, INTEL won't let you underclock their processors to reduce power even more - oh well!
Core isomething CPUs are clocked at 1600MHz when idle, underclocking further seems pointless to me.
I think you can limit the maximum multiplier of the CPU if the mainboard has that option, but I only overclock. Maybe you can get the same effect with a software tool?

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