M11x R3 Overclocking & Tradeoffs?

Hey, Im most likely gonna buy a M11x because of battery and compact size ect, And a pretty standard model at that.

What gets me though is im getting the basic SB model i3 and the clock speeds are quite low, I understand this is the ULV Cpus too

My idea though is if its possible to turn off hyperthreading (i dont do any video editing just some music conversion at the most really) that should bring the temps and power usage down right? But also clock the CPU to 2ghz if possible.

Would that be a good idea? I understand i will lose some battery life but it should not be too drastic right? Temps may go up a bit too.

 

Hyperthreading doesn't really turn down the power consumption / heat generation. Most of the power consumption on a CPU comes from the processing cores themselves, and not the "staging area" resources that hyperthreading uses.

If you want to increase battery life, then look into ways to either tweak the LCD display consumption by turning down brightness (LCD consumes 60% of the battery drain on a laptop, whereas the CPU takes up only about 25%).

If you specifically want to target power consumption of the CPU, look into tools that can help undervolt the CPU. Undervolting a CPU keeps the CPU running at the same clock speed, but reduces the amount of power delivered to that CPU to keep it running at a given clock speed. But even in this case, don't expect very much with a ULV processor (in the area of a few minutes of additional battery life for the entire full battery cycle).

 

I'm not sure about laptops but i can tell you from my experience in overclocking my desktop that turning off hyperthreading on a quad core, it results in a 10*C drop in temperatures which is fairly significant.

Kent is correct about the display, thats your major power hog. The only other one i can think of is the mechanical hdd which tends to draw 3-4w/h when reading and writing stuff. You should reduce that if you're willing to get an intel ssd or similar (which has other benefits amoung the .3ish w/h power consumption).

 

You can't overclock the i3 processor found in the M11x R3. If you want a faster processor you will have to stump up to the i5 (1.3-2.3 or 1.6-2.3GHz) or the i7 (1.5-2.6Ghz).

Both the i5 and i7 have Intels Turbo boost 2.0 which dynamically increases the multipler (BIN) depending on the CPU core load and TDP threshold*. I *think* the values given are for a single core so dual core will be slightly lower than the max turbo.

To give an example my i5 2500k (same basic architecture) has a base clock of 3.3GHz and a max turbo of 3.4-3.7GHz depending on core load:

1 Core - 3.7GHz
2 Core - 3.6GHz
3 Core - 3.5GHz
4 Core - 3.4GHz

The SB architecture limits Base clock overclocking to barely more than 5Mhz due to its internal ring bus design. All of the onboard controllers (PCI-e, Memory, SATA) run off the same base clock which is set at 100MHz, if this clock is increased it will overclock all of the controllers causing major system stability issues.

The only true way to overclock a SB processor is to get one with an unlocked multiplier (i7 extreme editions in the mobile space and K editions in the desktop space). None of the processors in the M11x support unlock multiplers so you are basically stuck.

 

Good post, I forgot about SB's very limited overclocking too tbh

Reason i am not going with the i5 though is because if i set up a m11x with that in it would cost me £810, Thats not including the ram i would need to purchase myself (and possibly a bigger hard drive) as there is no way i am spending £70 for some poxy 4gb OEM ram when i can get 8gb for cheaper than that.

But the i3 version i can get for £530 Im just thinking i should stick with that anyway as i can not get a better semi gaming laptop/netbook for cheaper or with better battery life

 

I'm pretty sure the i3 does not TURBO at all and is stuck at 1.3 Ghz so CPU intensive games will struggle, if it was up to me and money was tight I would still wait a few more months and save enough for an i5.
As a bonus you get a much better GPU.
Even if you think it's a great deal personally I would pass on the i3 version, but that's just me.

 

I am going to quote myself from another thread:

You certainly don't have to spend over £800 to get a decent M11x R3.

Whatever you do DO NOT buy the i3 model. The lack of Turbo boost will cripple your gaming ability.