How Does Intel Display Power Saving Technology Work?

Hi. I own a year-old Thinkpad z61t w/ GMA950, and I'm always looking out for ways to save battery life.

I have come across the "Intel Display Power Saving Technology" in the Intel display taskbar application. It seems to decrease my voltage, but I guess it could just be in my head.

I was just wondering how it works. What am I compromising? Thanks!

 

The document here says

However, I see no difference in brightness (which is usually controlled separately). I think I read somewhere that the reduction is actually in the refresh rate. If the display refreshes less frequently then both the GPU and the display itself should draw less power.

John

 

thanks for the response. anybody have any other input?

 

I agree with John about the refresh rate thing... but also if you want to save battery life, you mgiht want to try Undervolting Use a program such as Notebook hardware Control.

 

I've messed around with this setting and tried to test it out, and havn't be able to observe any power savings, one thing i did notice is that depending on what colors you have on the screen (Dark or light) it will increase or decrease the brightness, however in my opinion i've found it very distracting and always have it turned off. Intel's gpu in laptops are already very energy effcient so i'm sure this setting doesn't make much of a difference.

 

johnny T, i am currently using notebook hardware control. but for undervolting, if you can't undervolt the minimum multiplier (6x) in my instance, there's not going to be any battery life improvement (assuming i'm using the "max battery" setting), right?

NHC seems to not be able to undervolt under the default voltage of 0.9500 for my multiplier of 6x

 

really? odd indeed...

 

The core duo's and Core 2 Duos have their voltage locked @ 0.95 as the lowest settings, undervolting only helps with the higher mutipliers (In your case 7 and above)