Power saving features: Use or don't use?

[perdomot]

Been running my overclocked i5-760 at 4Ghz for a while now without issues and was considering enabling the various power saving features in the BIOS. The overclocker in me wants to keep it at full speed all the time but I'm curious how others handle their overclocks. Most intense thing I do is video encoding periodically but otherwise its web surfing and listening to music and watching video for me. Does it make sense to enable Speedstep, etc?

 

[Flipped Gazelle]

Well, your i5-760 is certainly more power-efficient than my (beloved) pig of a 1090T @ 4.2ghz, but I save 80w at idle when using a program called PhenomMSRTweaker to create low-power states for my CPU. IMO, if Intel's power-saving features don't bork your OC (as sometimes happens with AMD), I'd try it out.

 

[Puppies04]

Turn on all powersaving features, if your system stays stable then leave them turned on. If not either adjust your OC or just turn them back off. Simple

 

[Zap]

Last year I had my wife's Core i5-750 overclocked to 4.0GHz with power savings enabled. Not as easy of an overclock as with it disabled but it wasn't as difficult as on even older platforms. With the latest Sandy Bridge CPUs, leaving power savings enabled is normal.

 

[LoneNinja]

I typically have my systems downclocked and undervolted for basic internet usage, music/video, and well most everything. Crank out stock speeds or an overclock for games and the occasional software.

 

[perdomot]

Been running it with power saving on for a couple of hours without problems so now I'm going to turn on Prime and do some stress testing to see if it holds. Thanks for the feedback.

 

[ehume]

You may run into some instability when you change from idle to load. I wouldn't expect any problems going from semi-load to full load.