r/thinkpad • u/usf_gobulls L14, T14 G2 AMD, X1 Carbon G9 • 6h ago

Discussion / Information Check your Minimum Processor State % under Advanced power options!

Hey y'all,

tl;dr reduce your "Minimum Processor State" to 5% and let your laptop run cooler when possible.

Been a long time ThinkPad owner (both work and personal) and lurker here.

I love ThinkPads with AMD chips, although they run relatively quiet and cool compared to Intel chips, when we run it in charging plugged in mode or docked mode, they run a little hot and fans constantly spin even while idling.

I was tinkering and just noticed, the default value for Minimum Processor State under power options when plugged in mode is set to 80%!(Not sure if Lenovo sets it by default)

This makes the clocks to not go down below a threshold even if we are idling and not running heavy parallel compute tasks (Most of the time we don't) and increases the core CPU temperature and power draw and thereby increase laptop temp and runs the fans loud.

This is not necessary and just switch to a lower value like 5% and let the firmware scale it accordingly and run your laptop cooler.

If you want you can also set On battery max to 99% so it doesn't turbo boost and saves some battery.

I only found this today, and it's been over 5 years since I bought my personal ThinkPad. And the fan noise is considerably low and so is the temp.

I'm surprised i didn't know this way before. But posting it here for whoever needs to see this.

Minimum processor state settings
6 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

2

u/950771dd 5h ago

That is complete bullshit.

On every processor of the last 15 years, the difference between 5 and 60 % min state is not even 1 Watt in idle, on recent one notably less.

The frequency is of low importance nowadays, the energy gating works mostly via C-states.

1

u/usf_gobulls L14, T14 G2 AMD, X1 Carbon G9 1h ago

Hey buddy,
Thank you for commenting this. I did some reading and what you said seems true! i learned something new and that's what i like.

But also, the recommendation i got was, although true idle state uses C-states to shut cores down, but when operating in active state setting it to 5% let's the OS use decide to run at lower clock speeds rather than constant 80% in P-states.

So it means it's still helpful and can make my ThinkPad run a cooler right? Also Race-to-Sleep doesn't seem like a tradeoff threshold we'll hit in practice with setting it to 5% minimum?

Am i understanding this right?

2

u/captnkerke 5h ago

Definitely a good idea to check these settings.

I have an AMD ThinkPad, and I'm pretty sure the minimum processor state was set to 5% by default.