Currently and only on Intel platforms, the company introduced a new voltage displacement system called Adaptive Voltage or Adaptive Mode , which allows overclockers to take better advantage of it when overclocking. But what are the advantages of using this mode? Do you have any inconvenience that we do not know? As we will see later, all that glitters is not gold, but it is a great step towards achieving it.
With the arrival of the Haswell architecture in 2014, Intel finally kicked off this type of displacement mode that came to replace the well-known and discussed Offset mode . The advantages of this new Adaptive Mode or Adaptive Voltage (depending on the brand of motherboards we choose) came to do everything that its predecessor could do and, in theory, not have any of its weaknesses, but is it really true?
First of all, as we always have to point out that Overclocking is a practice that endangers the integrity of your processor and the rest of the system, and that therefore we do not recommend doing. If you do, let it be entirely your responsibility.
Adaptive voltage: the logical step towards a more sustainable overclocking
It’s no wonder the overclocker community blew up this new mode to increase CPU voltage. As we will know if we have read our article on Offset voltage, this mode manages to add an extra voltage to the CPU to achieve the necessary stability according to the frequency overclock that we have done.
The problem is that this voltage increase applies to all ranges and ranges of voltage / frequency. This means that if we increase 0.100 volts to the CPU in Offset mode, this figure will rise in all the frequency and voltage jumps of the processor, including the states of idle, PL0, PL1 and PL2.
This causes a higher overall consumption of the processor, but allows the same to lower the frequency and the voltage as if it were from stock.
The Adaptive mode logically goes further and what it achieves is to apply the voltage increase only in the turbo mode of the CPU, respecting the rest of the Intel microcode SKUs. Ie states PL0 and PL1 are maintained with their speeds and voltages of stock , but PL2 receives the increase that we find appointed him.
More advantages than disadvantages
The advantages are very clear: the increase in voltage only occurs when the processor really needs it, that is, in full and under load, while the rest of the values and jumps of the SKU remain unchanged.
But Intel has yet to do one thing Offset can do: use Offset to undervolt. No Intel platform can undervolt using Voltage Adaptive mode , therefore it can only be applied when the value is positive.
This can be contradictory, since the same voltage assures us a negative or positive value as we select it, but it does not really apply it. It is a problem that Intel has talked about very little and that is reminiscent of what happened with Haswell and precisely the Adaptive mode, where due to various problems with the TSV instructions it could not be enabled.
Later it was enabled thanks to disabling these instructions, but in return said Adaptive mode could not be used in the cache voltage. Years later and with the step of the architectures and the unification of the CPU and cache voltage, Intel managed that both could opt for this more advanced mode of voltage control for overclocking.
