Undervolting
Undervolting is reducing the voltage a chip requests at a given frequency, cutting heat and power so it can hold higher clocks for longer.
Also known as voltage offset, curve optimizer
Measured by SystemCheck
Part of the four-stage run: a 60-second sustained CPU load reporting throughput, decay and consistency; a memory stage reporting bandwidth and latency; a calibrated GPU raster load reporting frame time, pacing and decay; and a path tracer reporting samples per second. The paragraphs below say which metric carries this term.
Manufacturers set voltage curves with a safety margin wide enough to cover the worst chip that passed binning. Most individual chips are better than that worst case, so a negative offset of 50-120 mV is often stable. Less voltage means less heat at the same frequency, which means the chip hits its thermal or power ceiling later and settles at a higher sustained clock.
The failure mode is dangerous precisely because it is quiet. An unstable undervolt does not usually blue-screen immediately; it produces occasional wrong results, a crash hours later, or corrupted output in a long render. Validate any offset with a long mixed-workload stress run, not a two-minute benchmark, and back off from the first offset that shows any instability rather than the last one that seemed fine.
SystemCheck is a useful before-and-after instrument here. Record your CPU decay and consistency figures, apply the offset, and re-run under the same conditions. A successful undervolt shows up as reduced decay and a higher settled throughput. The clock is holding longer. It will not tell you the offset is stable; only sustained real-world use and a dedicated stability tool can do that.
Related terms