shut down
hold down volume up and power back up into BIOS
go to setup
go to advanced
go to the bottom and select your undervolt
you can get between 5~8% improvement in performance, for free. Or longer battery life when frame rate limited.
The maximum undervolt you can pick is -50mv which is pretty safe, not only is this small change unlikely to affect stability, it’s basically impossible you’d be unable to boot with -50mv, so you can always easily change it back if you don’t want to. Even if you somehow cannot boot, there’s a way to reset this without having to boot, you’re basically 100% safe.
So what’s the worst that could go wrong with this? Worse case scenario is instability, which can cause the game or the entire system to crash. And since we’re talking worse case scenario, if this happens during a system update or something, that could corrupt your system and you might have to reinstall the OS or something. So probably don’t experiment with this with a system update.
A bad but better scenario, is you’ve undervolted too much but still within the capability of the power management circuit to compensate, it compensates this by downclocking, which will reduce performance. So the way Zen2 works when you undervolt, is at first you get improved efficiency/performance. And then if you keep going too far, you get reduced performance from the automatic down clocks, and then if you still keep going too far, it will start to become unstable, so potential crashes.
But again, -50mv is VERY small, I think even with the worst silicon lottery draw, you only go into the reduced performance territory, I don’t think anybody will start crashing, not with a new device. (silicon quality can gradually degrade over many years)
How much you can undervolt is down to the silicon lottery. Some people have better luck than others
What is the easy way to reset bios on the deck in the worst case?
Worst case is you have to manually flash the BIOS chip with a previously saved backup using a chip programmer. It’s not fun but doable.
I’ve seen reports of people only being able to undervolt -20 or -30mv, so this is not really accurate.
After many reboots I settled on -20, -50, -20
Correct I’m able to run cyberpunk benchmark at -40 but even at -30 -20 -30 I’m getting games locking up after 10-40 min of gameplay. Lock ups occurred on Outer Worlds, little nightmares and cold steel 3. I’m hoping -20 across the board will be stable.
-50mv when the operating voltage is like 1.2v (totally guessing) is a sizable decrease in voltage. its not very small imo
-100mv is not uncommon with lottery winners
We don’t have enough data to say what undervolt the OLED SOC can typically handle, but based on LCD reports I would say 20-30 is the “safe” undervolt, not 50. It is a nice easy way to get a couple more percent battery life if your deck can handle it.
My LCD was unstable at -40. I pushed my OLED to -30 but haven’t bothered to go further. I’m already getting much better playtimes (would guess close to 50% longer) on Spiderman Remastered over my LCD version just based on battery/APU efficiency gains.
I just got my OLED and this was helpful, thanks!
So is a SoC undervolt best here? There are options to undervolt CPU and GPU as well.