cpu Can you down clock your cpu??

[Mohamed_jordan]

If you can slow your cpu to use less power and make less heat

I dont know why would any one would want this but ...ay its just come to my mind

[Jasun]

yes. you can also undervolt it, which is usually preferred because you will lose less performance than underclocking. 

[Ron1999]

underclocking will only lose performance , not really less heat , but as jasun said undervolting it will cause it to use less current therefore less heat. And why would somebody do it? to produce less heat. I intend to do this to a i5-8400 and undervolt as low as it will go while being stable, why ? because where I live is already overheated, and any excess heat is simply intolerable. I also intend to undervolt my gfx card gtx960. I would like all this to run from a nano-psu which can reach efficiency's unparalleled by ordinary sfx/atx psu.

Its the reason I am getting intel rather than AMD as the whole platform power use is significantly less. A gold rated PSU is also less waste heat. Most Pcs spend their time at or near idle , so its the idle power use I am looking at.

Edited April 27, 2018 by Ron1999
kubla Khan

[mariushm]

Most processors can work at a certain frequency when the voltage is at least at some minimum value.

Because there are variations in the manufacturing quality of the processors and the motherboard quality (how well they output a desired voltage to the processor), processors will generally request a slightly higher voltage.

So for example, if you take 100 processors from store shelves and try to determine the minimum voltage they need to reach 3.5 Ghz for example, you may have a wide range, let's say between 1.15v and 1.21v - so the processor simply tells the motherboard to give 1.25v and then it's sure it has enough power to function no matter what.

However, the higher the default voltage the more heat the processor will produce but it won't do more work at that frequency. So if you want to make your processor a bit cooler without increasing the fan noise, you could investigate and gradually reduce this voltage from the default voltage to some lower value.  For example, lower by 0.01v and run tests and if it's stable lower by another 0.01v and so on... when it crashes, you raise back the voltage by 0.01v and run again tests and make sure it's stable and that's your safe voltage.

 

You can also underclock the processor, the same way you'd overclock. When you overclock, raising the voltage is optional and some motherboards do it automatically for you.  But if you underclock, almost always the processor doesn't need the same high voltage as on default frequency to function, so you can further lower the voltage to save some energy.