Intel Undervolting Guide
Undervolting Guide
Undervolting Guide
We spoke during our Intel 14th Gen review about the importance of undervolting your processor. Intel have had something of a temperature problem since the 12th generation launched. Partly because their turbo boost technology pulls no punches, but partly because of the huge amount of cores available.
Now it’s one thing to say ‘you need to undervolt’, but how would you go about that? After all, most guides over the past decade have been dedicated towards overclocking your processor. Overclocking normally requires more volts. To undervolt sounds like you’re going to give up on performance for the sake of lower temperatures. That, as you’ll see throughout this undervolting guide, isn’t actually the case.
We want to give you the best possible tools to attain some good results on your system. Naturally with so many motherboards and chipsets on the market it’s impossible to be wholly comprehensive. However, the consistency of BIOS designs and the general concepts we’re using also mean you should be able to transfer these skills to other setups. We’ve got an ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI Z790 motherboards to give you clear path to follow. Between this guide, the accompanying video, and the security that you’re turning things down not up should mean if this is the first time you’ve delved into the BIOS you can do so with confidence.
Thankfully the concept is universally applicable. It’s the old adage about teaching people to fish. It might look like a lot, but in actuality once you’ve done the initial setup then the ‘refinement loop’ is fast and easy. Even if you’ve never once pressed the delete key whilst your system is starting up – to get into the BIOS – we still don’t think that this will take you more than 90 minutes to do. The vast majority of that time is watching benchmarks and noting results.
What You Need
Obviously you’ll need an Intel processor. Any motherboard should do, but for this guide we’re focussing upon Z790 ones. Don’t be discouraged if you’ve a B series though. It should all be the same. We recommend you update to the latest BIOS too. It’s not vital, but it never hurts. You’d be amazed at how much manufacturers continue to tweak long after the product has been released.
You’ll also need something to measure your voltages, temperature and clock speeds. HWMon is perfect for this. It’s a small download and runtime. You don’t even need to do anything other than run it.
Lastly you’ll need something that tests your CPU hard. Our favourite, and indeed the simplest to use, is Cinebench. You can use any of the most recent versions. For this we’re using R24, but R23 works just as well. You can download Cinebench from Maxon themselves. R24 is quite a chunky file at over a 1.3 GB. R23 is just 249 MB. Your call. Once you’re all setup, perhaps with a pen and paper to note the results, we can crack on.
