Notebook Hardware Control

[Zxian]

I just thought I'd share a great find that I've been using and testing for the past couple of weeks.

Notebook Hardware Control - Homepage

Everyone has probably heard of people overclocking and having to increase voltages to keep things stable, but for laptops, you want to lower the voltage to reduce power consumption.

I've got a Banias core Pentium-M 1.4GHz. By default, the system will step down the voltage along with the multiplier when there is no load on the processor. After using NHC for a while and testing with Prime95 and CPUBurn, I found that I could push the voltages down to these levels and still keep things stable (default voltages in brackets)

14x - 1.100V (1.484V)

12x - 1.036V (1.436V)

10x - 0.956V (1.308V)

8x - 0.860V (1.180V)

6x - 0.844V (0.956V)

Another really great advantage to this (overclockers will know this as well) is that the lower voltages mean less heat is generated. With the top multiplier at 1.1V, if I'm doing intensive CPU work (7-zipping for example) and my laptop is on its stand (Link), the fan doesn't come on! When my laptop is sitting on the flat desk, it takes a lot longer for the fan to kick in.

Quite simply put, it puts you in control of your CPU.

Another few features:

- Battery monitoring

- S.M.A.R.T. Hard disk monitoring and control

- CPU Temperature monitoring and Fan control.

- ATI Clock Control (over/underclock your graphics card to increase performance or save on battery life)

I could go on for quite a while describing all the advantages of this, but you should really just try it for yourself. It needs .NET Framework 2.0 Final installed, but it's not really that big of a deal. Best of all, for home use - IT'S FREE!!!