Thinkpads Forum

I know a similar topic has been discussed, much of that discussion has been general info about how to balance undervolting with a corresponding decrease in clock speed. This specific question has not been answered:

Does anyone know of an underclocking utility that works for the x60s that will get the clock multiplier under 6?

A clock multiplier of 6 is about 1ghz, which can still run a little hot in my opinion. I see no technical reason why Intel wouldn't allow a lower clock rate or Lenovo couldn't have implemented lower multipliers, but I have no idea how one would attempt to change this value.

Another idea is to disable one of the cores dynamically. Is this possible, and would it help power consumption noticably? (I know you can disable this in bios -- I may run power tests of my own with this option).

Without getting into the really dangerous area where there is a real chance of actual hardware damage, you can't really go lower than the minimum clock+mulitplier combo that Intel specifies. My T43 can go as low as 800Mhz while the T42 can go lower to 600MHz...going lower than 800MHz on the T43 with the same core voltage would cause significant instability as would going lower than 600MHz with the same core voltage on a T42. When designing, they make certain assumptions about the minimum clock speed that the chipset should run at; Intel has, apparently, designed it around 1GHz for the Core Duos and Core Solos.


I didn't see a way to dynamically switch off one core, though; I was too busy playing with my friend's new X60.

Could you go into more depth about these minimum clock speed assumptions? I'm not trying to be difficult, I'd really like to know.

Not only is there a minimum clockspeed assumption, but Intel also set it up so that you can not lower the voltage below 0.95v. Which is pretty high, IMO. That doesn't give much room for undervolting, but what can ya do? =/

I completely understand why there would be a minimim voltage assumption. Lower the voltage too much, and you don't make the threshold voltage for the transistors.

A 1ghz minimim clock speed assumption just doesn't make sense to me, which is why I'm curious what I must be missing.