[HowTo] Undervolting the AMD Turion X2 (and some others)
As most are aware,AMD's processors tend to overheat ... a lot.Worried due to the heat, I searched for some solutions.Undervolting is one of the easier ones,but finding a suitable tool to do the job on the k8 line is difficult.Through my searches I came across TurionPowerControl.
quoting Ares Drake from HowTo: Undervolt your notebook CPU for longer battery life
<quote>From wikipedia: Undervolting is the practice of reducing the supply voltage of a computer's CPU. There are many reasons to perform this sort of modification, but a common one is to reduce power consumption and thus heat generation in laptop computers. Lower heat generation provided by undervolting and underclocking is also helpful in making computers quieter.
Performance will not suffer as the energy you will save was just wasted (as heat) before.
Safety:
Undervolting notebook processors is not uncommon. My older notebook (Toshiba S1) even came with a Windows utility that did automatic undervolting preinstalled. So the "undervolted" processor is nothing dangerous.
</quote>
Still I take no responsibilities for any damage you may cause to your system.Do this at your own discretion.
Here are the steps I followed:
1)Download the TurionPowerControl rar from http://amdath800.dyndns.org/amd/tpc-0.12.rar
2)Extract the rar.Read the readme.txt.Fire up a terminal ,navigate to the linux src sub-directory and enter.This will create a binary file by the name of TurionPowerControl in that folder.Copy this file over to /bin (requires root access).Code:c++ TurionPowerControl.cpp Processor.cpp cpuPrimitives.cpp -o TurionPowerControl
3)Now the program is in place.To execute it,you need to first load the modules cpuid and msr.
Thats it. To run it simply executeCode:sudo modprobe msr sudo modprobe cpuidReplace the {*} with suitable commands,listed in the readme.Code:sudo TurionPowerControl -{*}
I have a Turion X2 2.1 ghz processor,and this works for me.At least from what TPC tells.Do tell if you know of a more official/ better way to verify the processor voltages.
Tip: I would suggest creating a shell script with the repetitive commands needed to set the correct voltages to all the states, and executing it with sudo ( this has to be done at every startup.)
Or even better,make this script execution automatic.I don't know how to automatically execute a script as superuser at startup, please do tell if you know.
Adv Reply
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Re: [HowTo] Undervolting the AMD Turion X2 (and some others)
Originally Posted by ChaosHead
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