Effectively undervolting E5200 - how?

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poisonborz
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Dec 07, 2011 4:51 am

Effectively undervolting E5200 - how?

Post by poisonborz » Wed Dec 07, 2011 5:56 am

Hola,
I have a server (E5200 + GA-G41M-ES2L + 2 HDDs) – naturally in this case, speed is much less important than power consumption. So I thought it would be a good idea to toy around voltages: I whipped out my cheap power consumption meter, and entered the BIOS.

I found very little usable info on how to effectively do this, so what I did was simply lower the multiplier to the minimum and lower the vCore step by step. I've gone down to 0.85 (from the default 1.2), but – while the system was stabile, I found no traces of lower consumption.

Before the system idled at around 48W, after the setting it was like 45-46W. As I have a cheap measuring device (with a fault rate of prop. 3-4W), this could be next to nothing.

Is there something I did wrong? What is the lowest Watt rate one can get via such settings?
Thanks

Arbutus
Posts: 234
Joined: Wed Jun 02, 2010 9:15 pm
Location: Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Re: Effectively undervolting E5200 - how?

Post by Arbutus » Wed Dec 07, 2011 7:00 pm

Most E5200's automatically reduce speed and voltage from 2.50 GHz to 1.2 Ghz and 1.1 V core voltage when idle. This feature is called Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology (EIST). Forcing the speed and voltage lower than the EIST values does very little for additional power savings.

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