Should I Undervolt the Ryzen 9 7940HS?

Would be interesting to see the impact on battery usage.
I may give it a try when my FW16 unit arrives (Batch 1). As my workstation still works, I think the first weeks/months will be dedicated to testing the sh*t out of it :slight_smile: Just because I can :smiley:

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Afaik you can’t do that, unless the mainboard supports it, but please do give it a try.
Framework hasn’t officially announced if it’s supported, so we won’t know unless you give it a try.

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If it turns out to actually be possible, you probably should.

As it is now it looks like amd locked that out a generation ago and intel a bit before that.

It’s not been confirmed the Framework supports that feature.

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Has anyone supported that feature on a 6th or 7th gen amd mobile processor?

The 7940HS is listed as supporting Curve Optimizer Voltage Offsets so it should be possible in theory. The 7840HS does not support it unfortunately.

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Has anyone been able to undervolt a 7940hs on any device jet? Even if the device manufacturer does not support it, it should be accessible vie smokeless umaf if the registers for it actually exist.

Apparently someone did:

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Not sure if I am more glad it still works or mad about it being locked down on other versions of the same chip.

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ShiroudanRegular

1d

From my experience, undervolting has had massive benefits (5000 series).
Additionally, modern CPUs run too high up on the Freq.-Voltage graph imo, so underclocking even 10% can sometimes drop peak power usage by 30-50%. May be worth considering.

Adding to this.

The equation for power consumption is: Power = Capacitance * Frequency * Voltage^2

Also, dropping voltage drops max frequency (although you may have to manually configure this). Capacitance is part of the hardware design, you can’t do anything about that. I’m going to look into this once I get my order. Longer battery life is more important that power. The Ryzen 7s are overkill for me as is.

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So, the first people should now own a FW16 7940HS. Is undervolting possible or not?

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Yes please, would love to hear this. If so, and it yields useful power savings, I’ll probably modify my order to get the 7940. Would be awesome if there was a Linux that I could have it automatically do, on battery do the undervolt, plugged into the wall go full blast to get the last bit of performance.

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If you have an order in an earlier batch, you should probably stick with what you have as to modify your CPU, you have to cancel your existing pre-order and make another one.

Undervolting is where you instruct the CPU to run at the same performance but consume less power.

Undervolting doesn’t hurt performance, in fact modern CPUs are programmed so that when under load they will increase performance as much as possible while keeping the power consumption below a certain limit and not overheating. So reducing power consumption for the same performance means the CPU will respond by increasing performance to reach the same power consumption under load.

In total undervolting reduces power consumption for the same performance, and when hit with a full load it will ramp up to the same power consumption but higher performance.

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That’s not possible.

Aw man! :frowning: I’m Batch 12, so far enough out in theory I could for some things. It’s a DIY edition though. I don’t see “Performance” or “Overkill” in the DIY configurator, but probably still something that I’d lose my batch. Which I really don’t want to do.

It doesn’t matter which edition, changing the CPU is impossible. Framework, still being a small company, probably orders those as needed and would run into a problem if too many people first order one CPU just to switch to another as that would fill out their storage capacities unnecessarily with the first ordered CPUs and those are the most expensive part of the whole laptop, I guess.

There are some things to keep in mind when undervolting using Curve Optimizer:

  • Stability: The problem is usually stability during idle and switches between lower and higher powerstates. Hence the lots and lots of people throwing a big CO undervolt at their CPUs and claiming stable after running some load tests. The instability at lower power/voltages can be very subtle and hard to trigger.
  • Clock stretching: This is a protection mechanism at higher points on the voltage/frequency curve to prevent crashes caused by voltages to low for the wanted frequency. Your system will show high clocks but benching can show lower results caused by this behaviour.

Essentially, test stability on the whole frequency range and with spiky/transient loads and check if you actually gain performance by doing more CO offset while controlling other variables (temps,fan speed).
Be prepared to sink a lot of time into this if you want do it properly. I have done it for a desktop 5950X and while it gained me some performance it’s more the fun while tinkering aspect for me than the actual result. Single digit gains on some of the cores. Maybe there is more potential in a laptop because of thermal limits but YMMV.

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Did the undervolting reduce power consumption in general, or does the same amount of power wind up used when under load? And would undervolting reduce thermal throttling, or again when it’s under load does it not make a difference?

My experience with the desktop version of the 7000’s is that it reduces both thermal throttling and power consumption as wattage is turned into waste heat. Validated with HWInfo and my UPS, my avg watts pulled on my 7800X3D is around 28-30watts with a ton of tabs and things up and running. 70-80w maximum peaking while gaming.

As mentioned above, For those looking into it, both of the CPU’s per AMD don’t support overclocking officially, while only one (7940) supports offsets. Whether or not they classify undervolting as overclocking, I’m not entirely sure. See 7940 vs 7840 here. Other thing to note with the mobile CPUs is STAPM, when they hit their max thermal sink, they throttle. I think that both GN and Level1 Techs had videos about STAPM due to issues with the recent desktop 8000 apu’s.