Downclock to maximize battery life

[romancoins79]

Hello,

Am am looking for a way to maximize batery life by downclocking the processor do 1,2 GHZ or less. On Asus eee it could be done in two ways - by SET FSB (but you need an hardware code wich is not avilable for AAO yet) or by a nice little program eeectl (wich works automaticly at windows startup). None of this methods work on AAO.

Do somebody know for a way to downclock (or overclock) the acer one?

Thnak's,
Timi

 

[Davidcowling]

doesnt it underclock to 800mhz when it needs too anyway?

 

[Wicked]

By default the power mode is set to "balanced"... the CPU sits at 800 mhz and goes up to 1.07, 1.33 and 1.6 GHz when needed.
I just tried the "powersave" mode and the CPU acts the same way...

Check out the tool called cpufreq, you can probably keep the CPU at 800 mhz with cpufreq-set

 

[romancoins79]

Thank's for the information. I forgot to mention that i look for a tool for windows XP - i know that the linux version is optimized - but in windows we would need something diffrent.

Timi

 

[brainy]

Try rmclock, I'm using it for a amd sempron laptop, and my core 2 duo desktop, it's possible that it works on the one also. I should try windoz on an external hdd just to see how it works in my one ...

 

[Davidcowling]

it just depends on how much of a drop in performance you are willing to put up with!!

 

[Frojd]

Try rmclock, I'm using it for a amd sempron laptop, and my core 2 duo desktop, it's possible that it works on the one also. I should try windoz on an external hdd just to see how it works in my one ...

RMclock doesn't workwith the atom...at least not yet, unfortunately.

 

[hmmwv]

Thank's for the information. I forgot to mention that i look for a tool for windows XP - i know that the linux version is optimized - but in windows we would need something diffrent.

Timi

Atom has speedstep build in, so it does downclock to 800mhz in XP during idling. Get CPU-Z and you'll see the changing frequency, also set your power profile at Portable (between 800 and 1600mhz) or Max battery (which should not allow the CPU to reach 1.6ghz).

 

[Deoki]

Try Notebook Hardware Control.

It might work under Atoms. I've been using it in my Aspire 5601 for two years and it seems to work better then any other power manager.

 

[Fishstick]

If you are running linux, I would not downclock. Linux "races to idle" and will be more efficient in the long run as opposed to underclocking.

From lesswatts.org:

Current processors are quite good about saving power when idle; so much so that many show a behavior around power saving that surprises many people.

This behavior, called race-to-idle, is best explained with a simplified example:

Lets take a typical commercially available processor that consumes 34 Watts when running at full speed, and 24 Watts when running at half speed and 1 Watts when idle (using frequency and voltage scaling using P-states).

On this processor, we're decoding one second of a MP3 file or some HDTV media every second. This decoding takes 0.5 seconds at half speed, and, consequently, 0.25 seconds at full speed.

The energy consumption for one second is

* Half speed: 0.5s * 24W + 0.5s * 1W = 12.5 Joules
* Full speed: 0.25s * 34W + 0.75s * 1W = 9.25 Joules

Even though the above example is simplified from reality, the same paradigm tends to hold for real systems: It's generally better to run as fast as you can so that you can be idle longer.