Is Undervolting Your GPU Worth It for Lower Power Consumption in Laptops?

Find out ways in which undervolting your GPU can help your gaming laptop with extended battery life, lower temperatures, and more.

Gaming laptops nowadays are incredibly powerful due to manufacturers providing high-performance CPU and GPU models inside them. Meanwhile, laptop coolers have undergone a significant evolution. Still, modern processors and laptop chips have very high transistor counts, and within a short space, they are incredibly hard to cool.

This is plain physics in action. If the source of heat is large, then it’s easier to cool; whereas if it’s tiny and produces immense heat, then cooling becomes seriously complicated. This is where undervolting shines, particularly for the GPU, as it is the component that consumes the most power from your laptop’s budget. Let’s dig in.

How Undervolting Works

RTX 5060 Ti vs RTX 3090: Specs, Price, Performance, and More Compared — An image showing an AMD and Nvidia GPU (Image via MSI)

Due to stability concerns, every laptop manufacturer and GPU vendor determines a voltage-to-frequency curve that is generally on the higher side, sufficient to sustain the advertised clock speed.

However, many GPUs, depending on their binning, can reach the advertised frequency at a much lower voltage, which creates a significant drawback for this approach. If you undervolt your laptop’s GPU, the power draw decreases by around 10-25%. Your CPU, depending on how the BIOS is configured, can efficiently utilize this remaining power.

Now, here is the fun part: once you find that your laptop’s GPU can reach its advertised frequency at a lower voltage, you can gradually increase the clock speed until it becomes unstable at that voltage.

Once you find the sweet spot, like frequency to voltage to power, you can call it a day. Alternatively, if you want to push further, slowly increase the voltage and observe its stability. This way, you are maximizing your laptop’s TGP, since you cannot raise it without shunt-modding. Games will notice improved performance, of course, depending on the game and whether it is core-heavy or memory-heavy.

Key Benefits

As discussed earlier, here are some key benefits that follow after an undervolt.

Extended battery life
Lower temperature and noise
More sustained peak performance
Better lifespan of components due to lower heat

Potential Downsides

An overly aggressive undervolt can cause stability issues and may produce graphical glitches and artifacts within the 3D workload. It is best to check out review outlets and get an estimate of how things are, and then proceed very cautiously.

Performance does fall off when you are undervolting, regardless of whether you are hitting the same frequency; it drops by 2-3%. However, this can be mitigated by increasing the VRAM clock.

Verdict

On PCs, this process is easily carried out by MSI Afterburner or any other GPU vendor software. However, in laptops, many models, such as those from Lenovo, MSI, Clevo, and Asus, offer control panels that allow you to perform steps like this, and even in a more simplified manner than using a curve editor approach.

That said, if you are running into thermal constraints, undervolting can turn things around; it’s a very low-risk and high-reward option you can try out, as undervolting doesn’t brick your hardware, whereas overvolting does.

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