What Is Undervolting on Laptops 2026? Benefits, Risks & How-To

What Is Undervolting on Laptops? Does It Cause Any Harm, and How Do You Apply It for Better Performance?

Lower heat, more speed, and better performance. What does undervolting mean? Does it cause any harm? And how can you apply it? That is what we will learn about in this article. Does your laptop become hot after running for a few hours? One proven way to reduce the heat your laptop produces is to limit the amount of power (voltage) it consumes, or what is called undervolting.

What Is Undervolting?

The CPU in your laptop needs a steady, stable electric current to work. It is natural for part of this electrical power to be lost as heat emitted by the processor. The electric current reaching the processor has several specifications, one of which is the voltage, which represents the pressure that pushes the electrons (and thus the electric current) toward the processor. When we undervolt, we reduce this pressure, which in turn means reducing the amount of electrical power reaching the processor, and therefore reducing the amount of power lost as heat.

Manipulating this electric current reaching the processor can change its performance. On the contrary of all this, undervolting will reduce your laptop's power consumption and therefore reduce its heat production, and this will not slow your laptop down; on the contrary, it will increase its speed and improve its performance overall. This is because modern processors automatically increase their speed if their temperature is low. Conversely, they reduce their speed (and thus their performance) if their temperature is high, in an attempt to lower that heat. So by undervolting, you can improve your laptop's performance as well as its battery life at the same time. But if you reduce it excessively, it may lead to instability in the processor's performance, and then you have to back off a little.

Does Undervolting Cause Any Harm?

Undervolting is considered safe, and it is not possible for it to cause permanent damage to the processor. But excessive undervolting can lead to instability in the laptop's performance, cause some errors, or perhaps make it stop working, exactly as happens when the laptop's battery runs out, and this does not usually cause damage to the processor or the laptop itself. Note that when it comes back to work, it will return to its normal state unless you had set the undervolting to activate automatically at boot.

Undervolting differs from overvolting, which should only be done by professionals. This is because if you give your laptop an excessive amount of electrical power beyond its need, it may lead to permanent, irreversible damage to the processor, the motherboard, or other laptop components. Note that this damage may occur within months or even seconds of overvolting, and may turn your laptop into a useless piece of scrap. Although undervolting is generally safe, there is a slight possibility of something going wrong, such as overvolting by mistake, or undervolting so excessively that it causes the laptop to suddenly stop working and lose what you are working on as a result. So doing this remains at your own responsibility.

How Do You Undervolt Using ThrottleStop?

There are several ways to adjust the amount of voltage reaching the processor. The easiest of these methods on laptops with an Intel processor is by using the ThrottleStop program. For AMD processors, you can use Ryzen Controller to lower the maximum temperature allowed to be reached, which in turn will reduce the voltage. If that does not work, you can use the Universal x86 Tuning Utility. Note that adjusting the voltage is a distinctive feature of modern Intel processors, and this feature may not be available for all processors, especially Ryzen ones.

Back to Intel processors: after downloading ThrottleStop, you must extract it to a new folder. The program does not need installation; all you have to do is open it and click OK when the warning message appears. When the program window opens, you have to click FIVR, which is short for Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator, the voltage control tool for Intel processors. To make sure the changes you make to the voltage do not revert when you close the program, click the "OK – Save Voltages Immediately" option. Then choose CPU Core under the FIVR Control options group, and then enable Unlock Adjustable Voltage.

We will keep the Adaptive option enabled, but we will only change the Offset Voltage. This means the voltage will change according to the processor's need, but we will reduce it by the amount mentioned in Offset Voltage. The undervolting process requires some experimentation to reach the ideal point where the reduced voltage is sufficient for the processor's requirements, to avoid any errors or to prevent the laptop from stopping when performing demanding tasks. So start by reducing the voltage by 100 millivolts (mV), by adjusting the value next to Offset Voltage to -100 and then choosing Apply. If the laptop does not immediately stop working, this means the undervolting is currently suitable, but we will do some additional checks shortly. If it stops working, restart ThrottleStop, but this time choose a smaller value (like -50 mV) for Offset Voltage.

The second step is to reduce the voltage in CPU Cache by selecting it within the FIVR Control options group and doing the same previous steps. You can repeat this process over and over until you reach the settings most suitable for your laptop and processor.

How Do You Verify the New Settings?

After each change, we advise you to run a test to verify that the settings suit you. There is a TS Bench tool built into ThrottleStop, and this tool verifies that the laptop will not encounter any errors under the new settings. To run this test, close the FIVR window by clicking OK, then choose TS Bench, where a new side window will appear, and here click Start to begin the check. If the TS Bench tool does not display any errors and the laptop does not encounter any problems or stop working during the check, this means the settings are suitable for your laptop. Otherwise, you must adjust the Offset Voltage value and try again.

If you want to reduce the voltage by more than 125 millivolts, you must first choose another Range below the Offset Voltage and then adjust the value, as some processors can withstand a voltage drop of up to 200 millivolts or even more. You may have also noticed the Intel GPU option (and in some models you may notice the iGPU Unslice option), and you can use it to reduce the voltage reaching the integrated graphics card, which will lower the laptop's heat further. If the iGPU Unslice option is present, you must choose the same Offset Voltage value as in Intel GPU. Thus, in just 15 minutes, your laptop's performance will become better, and at the same time its heat will stay low. You can run more checks to verify the new settings using Prime95 while monitoring your laptop's temperature with Core Temp, before and after the changes; undervolting can be considered successful if you notice a drop in temperature.