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I have an AMD APU (A6-4400M) and sometimes performance decreases when TurboCore increases Voltage/Clock speed. I use AMD Overdrive to manage Voltage and CPU Speed cause my fan gets crazy when reaching 3.2 Ghz at 3.1250 V (50°C - 70°C on heavy tasks)

I changed the APU Speed to 3.0 Ghz and voltage to 1.1750 and now works much better even after applying changes. Why do this happens? Isn't it supposed that TurboCore chooses the best performance setting for my CPU? After applying changes (Not closing anything I had open when TurboCore do it's job) performance increases a lot, even multitasking freezing decreases a lot. I actually did it because of the fan getting crazy but never thought this would increase my speed.

From what I know, lower voltage mean less activity and I know sometimes overclocking CPU causes bad performance but I haven't done anything, it was automatically done by the APU, but with a low voltage and a good clock speed everything seems to work even better. Fan is slow, temperature is low, and multitasking performance is much better. Why do this happens? I know that there may be APU's GPU performance issues but I'm not gamer, I haven't tested games in this CPU voltage/clock state.

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  • Undervolting may lead to seemingly random errors. How much you can undervolt without that happening is specific to your CPU. AMD simply chose a safe value that works for everyone.
    – Daniel B
    Jun 10, 2016 at 5:23
  • Yeah, I read the specifications and it says that minimun voltage is 0.4V but that is way TOO low lol So I chose something not too low but not too high
    – c_str
    Jun 10, 2016 at 5:26

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It also means lower thermal output. My guess is that, at stock speeds, your environment is warm enough to cause thermal protection to kick in, throttling the device. Lowering the speed and voltage causes the device to hit a sweet spot for your environment.

Turbo Core should give optimal performance in general but it may be tuned for specific, common environments (e.g.: "room temperature") and your environment may fall outside of that tuning.

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  • I've been thinking about fan and CPU thermal paste being bad, since I have 2 years with this notebook but I guess it's something else, Ovedrive gives me temperatures between 50 - 70°, up to 70° when developing OpenGL stuff or doing heavy tasks. That's not really a very high heat to make my CPU randomly slow and my fan crazy, and my room is always at around 26°C. Don't what can be but at least I found a solution jajaja
    – c_str
    Jun 10, 2016 at 5:36
  • @c_str If it seems to cap at a certain temperature, I'd still say that points to thermal throttling kicking in. Being a laptop, they tend to be conservative for that.
    – Ouroborus
    Jun 10, 2016 at 6:15

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