I’ve made it a point that I’d buy my laptop equipped with a Intel U-Based – this is to make sure that my laptop is as light, power efficient and quiet as possible. My HP Spectre X360 does all of this; well almost. It’s light (around 1.3kg), power efficient (8-10 hours of battery plus), but is not the quietest laptop on the planet.

When the laptop has a relatively moderate task to process, it ramps up the CPU to full (3.5 Ghz). That’s great, except for the fact that high clocks generate a lot of heat. When the threshold temperature is constantly exceeded (in my laptop’s case, around 50c), the fan needs to kick-in in order to manage thermals.

There’s nothing wrong with that; the laptop functions perfectly. What I’d like is to do all these tasks, whilst the laptop remains cool and will only require passive cooling. How can this be achieved? By lowering the maximum CPU Clock, of course!

What I ended up doing is setting up the maximum CPU usage to 45% (at around 1.6 Ghz), instead of 100%. This means that tasks run slightly slower, but meaning that the laptop runs way cooler. Even better, most of the time, the performance cost is not felt since the tasks do not actually max the CPU usage; thus a lower CPU clock is sufficient!

For now, I’ve solved it naively – setting up this value as a fixed value is not the most efficient. There are times that my laptop is running well below under the threshold temperature where the fan needs to kick-in. A more intelligent solution is to adjust the temperatures on the fly, so that the laptop maintains a target temperature, much like how NVIDA’s GPU Boost works.

This is very easy to set up – this can be accessed through the Windows Power Options. Here’s a step by step guide.

That’s it! Next time, we’ll see how we can do all this programmatically, through WinAPI.

Until the next one.