Talk:Pentium M undervolting and underclocking

Hei Thinker,

according to my notion of the character of this page, i thought it should possibly be renamed to something like "How to lower voltage and clock speed on Pentium M processors" ("lower" might be replaced by "finetune" or "manually lower" or "tweak" or something else expressing more the expert audience of the article). This has the following advantages:

• complies with the naming scheme ;-)
• has words more likely to be found in google (voltage vs. undervolting; clock, speed vs. underclocking)
• Are undervolting/underclocking proper english words anyway?
• Follows a scheme of "from general to specific". The topic of the article is underclocking/undervolting. That it's for Pentium M processors is kind of secondary to that.

What do you think? I can do it if you agree.

Wyrfel 00:21, 21 Oct 2005 (CEST)

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Good points. Personally I'm fond of short technical titles, but I agree about accessibility and consistency with the rest of the site. I have a feeling (though no proof) that the underclocking doesn't really work (as I noted recently), so how about "Reducing voltage on the Pentium M processor" for now?

BTW, "underclocking" is pretty standard techie jargon (and a clear parallel of the well-known "overclocking"). "Undervolting" is somewhat less common, though I've seen it in use.

--Thinker 00:55, 21 Oct 2005 (CEST)

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Which patch to use?

Since I might find the time to fiddle around with reducing the power consumption further, I wonder which of the 3 alternatives works best. Any recommendations?

--spiney 11:05, 21 Dec 2005 (CET)

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They all work... I think Alternative 2 is easiest to use.

--Thinker 13:06, 21 Dec 2005 (CET)

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Init Script

Hi. I'm the author of the SysFS patch of "Alternative 2"

I have recently seen that someone has added your init script to my wiki page on gentoo-wiki. But unfortunatly this guy has removed all the exisiting content of the page at the same time. So a few hours later an admin of the site as reverted the page to its previous state.

Well that was just for the story of how I came to your wiki page. I just wanted to say That I have adedd again the init script to my page. It's a nice thing. A lot more "gentoo spirit" that what I was using before (that is adding some code in /etc/conf.d/local.start)

I have made some modifications to the init script before adding it on my wiki page. So maybe you want to have a look at it.

Cheers! --Bdz 23:26, 10 Jan 2006 (CET)

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Unrecognized processors

Alas, I still can not use the speedstep-centrino module on my T43p - it will not recognize my processor and load the appropriate /sys/devices../cpufreq knobs. However, acpi-cpufreq works nicely.

If I try to load the (patched by method #2) speedstep-centrino module with

# modprobe speedstep-centrino

I am given...

    FATAL: Error inserting speedstep_centrino
   (/lib/modules/2.6.15.4/kernel/arch/i386/kernel/cpu/cpufreq/speedstep-centrino.ko): No such device

...don't really understand it - the T43p uses the (Dothan) Pentium M processor, mine is the 2.13 MHz version. Looking through the code, I don't see why it should complain (appears Banias CPUs are recognized -> anything else is Dothan). Any ideas - I'll look into BIOS settings(?). Others with a T43(p) - does bdz-patched speedstep-centrino load for you without difficulty?

Update - figured it out - you still have to include the ACPI tables option with bdz's patched centrino module - note that some of the documentation explicitly noted removing this option.

Underclocking results in a *noticably* cooler processor, approximately 3-5 degrees, which is often enough to have the fan stop (now 43 deg basal temp on my lap.)

--gsmenden 23:50, 12 Feb 2006 (EST)