Gaming

Changing voltages and fan curves is super situational. And depends on how much you value noise over performance.

That said, I undervolted and underclocked the i7 cpu on my G501 gaming laptop back in the day.

This helped a ton, because the heatsink between the discrete GTX 660M and the CPU, shared a heatpipe. The CPU would only throttle at 90, while the GPU would throttle at something like 75. This meant that because it was basically always hotter, heat from the CPU would conduct via the heatpipe INTO THE GPU, causing it to always thermal throttle, and be unable to be cooled. Because even though it was maxing out and trying to cool down by throttling, the CPU would just keep going because for it the temps were fine. So it would keep pumping heat into the heatsinks and heatpipes, which would then keep the GPU hot, too.

Undervolting the CPU allowed it and the GPU to run at closer to same temps, raising FPS by way of allowing the GPU to actually run a full tilt, even though the CPU was then significantly slower.

I undervolted my 5800x3d (each core individually) and it cut the temps by quite a bit, without affecting performance. Actually if anything you could say the performance arguably increased because it was no longer the hot little hog it was ootb.

I totally understood some of these words.

Do you know of good beginner friendly undervolting guides for AMD & Nvidia? This would go a long way towards people heeding your advice.

I didn’t have any luck undervolting my GPU; It would just crash with even the smallest voltage offset. That said, I have had success undervolting my CPU. I’d also suggest limiting the total power draw. No noticeable drop in performance for lower temps and reduced fan noise.

I wouldn’t recommended it if you don’t have fairly clean power. Definitely run into issues where a voltage drop in the mains would just shut off my system.

I undervolted my 5800X3D and 9800X3D and that helped with temps a lot.

I never undervolted my GPU, I generally go the other way with it. My 4080 lost the silicon lottery, couldn't get any more out of it. Not sure if I won it with my 5080 because a lot of people seem to be having large gains, but I got my boost clock to to a little over 3 GHz and a +1GHz to the memory.