Curiosity about NHC and X31

[mazzinia]

Hi,

Maybe I'm asking something that is available somewhere else but, is there any list of tested and secure values for NHC relative to a X31 1.4Ghz? (asking since, I don't know if it's related or not, but immediately after one friend installed nhc on his notebook, so as soon as he configured the values of nhc, the hd went bad - corruption of the reserved sector where part of the hd geometry data are stored. So, bye bye hd. A strange coincidence)
Second question... under the same operational conditions, what would be the gain in battery life? (more or less, obviously)

[tomh009]

I use 0.764V as my 6x voltage on my X31 (1.6 GHz) and also on my wife's X31 (1.4 GHz), and I know a few other people have ended up using my recommendations as well. The higher multipliers really matter less but for the sake of completeness I use only 6x and 16x -- and the latter is set to 1.324V.

I vaguely recall a battery life gain in the 30-minute range, but, more importantly, the X31 is much cooler and more pleasant to use now.

[qviri]

If you mean how much one can undervolt the CPU:

It depends on your machine, due to sample variance in manufacturing - one CPU will be a better undervolter than the other.

The stock voltage at 600 MHz (slowest, idle) is 0.956 V. I'd imagine virtually all chips will go down to 0.900 V. Mine goes to 0.800 V, but if I try to bring it lower I get bluescreens. I've seen reports about going as low as 0.700 V - though these are probably exceptions to the rule.

As for gain in battery life, when undervolting the CPU you are reducing the power it eats by the square of the reduction in voltage. (P=V*I, I=V/R, thus P=V^2/R, resistance being a feature of the chip.) Therefore, if you drop the voltage by 10% (to 0.9*original value), you reduce the power consumption by 19% (to 0.81*original value).

Unfortunately the CPU is not the only thing eating battery power, so the increase in battery life won't be quite as large. (I wouldn't recommend undervolting your hard drive, though for the wireless card it might be an interesting mod.) For example, Tom's CPU is running at 0.8*original voltage, thus 0.64*original power. If only the CPU was running off the battery, his battery life would have gone up 36%. Assuming the original battery life was three hours, he gained 16% in runtime total.

[mazzinia]

Thanks to both of you.

Now, if only I would manage to find a KVM working with a Dock I (ok, would have been better a Dock II, but I got a very good deal on a new Dock I) I could be happy... the one I have becames crazy if I plug the cables in the dock.

[Lomax]

NHC works really well for me too, laptop much cooler now that I undervolt my processor to 0.780v. Got it down to 0.700 before I stared experiencing any lock-ups.

I have tried to get the ACPI options to work by downloading two different sets of C# & XML files to put in the acpi folder of NHC (after editing the machine identifier in the XML to match my machine). For some reason it just refuses to work and I'm still stuck with the "ACPI Control System is not yet configurated (sic) for this system" message on the ACPI tab. Has anyone here successfully set up NHC to use ACPI on an X31 or X32? What's the trick?

Any help much appreciated.

Lomax

[ragefury32]

Works fine on my machine, YMMV.

[Tholek]

Yes, but I doubt you get all the functionality you might with a tailored config file.

Best to check out their forum to ask for one, or see if one gets posted:

http://www.p35-forum.de/board/

[BassPunk]

Ive taken other users voltages and found them to be unstable after a long gaming session. My Current settings are 100% stable.

http://img258.imageshack.us/img258/6374/voltmh4.jpg

Mod edit: no pictures without subject line warning

[tomh009]

I notice 0.780V compared to my 0.764V. Not a big difference, could be explained by slight variations in the CPUs -- or maybe I don't do enough gaming!