What does the Minimum Processor State option in the Advanced options box of a Power Plan do?

Question

Original title: Minimum Processor State

What does the 'Minimum Processor State' option in the Advanced Options box of a Power Plan do? If I set it to 50%, does that mean that Windows will feed the processor useless calculations just to keep it at 50% capacity? If so, why would that be of any use? If not, then what does it do?

Thanks for any clarifications,

Rifdhan

Answer 1

Yes, it should.

Answer 2

Hi Rifdhan,

The main reason you would set your Minimum Processor State option to above the minimum (such as 50%) is if you are running very CPU intensive programs and they would not function well at lower CPU states.

Processors do not require a steady stream of information to function at a certain speed. For example if you have a 2.0ghz CPU and you set the minimum processor state to 50%, the lowest it will ever drop to is 1.0ghz, even at idle.

With your minimum set to 50% and maximum set to 100%, the actual speed it runs will stay between those two values and current battery life amount will factor into what speed it chooses to run at with an average of 75%.

If you set your minimum to 5% and maximum to 100% it will drop extremely low to preserve battery life.

Hope this helps explain how this works and hopefully someone else can help clarify further.

Answer 3

Thank you for your explanation. It cleared up a lot of questions. But just to clarify - will performance in CPU-intensive increase if you set a higher minimum state?

Thanks,

Rifdhan

Answer 4

Thanks for everything!

Rifdhan

Answer 5

Ok, this topic is interesting….. I happened to have a DELL INSPIRON Mini (Win 7 HP), and I decided to play with the processor minimum state to see how much my battery life would  increase…..I got it to 1% minimum, and 3 % maximum…. At this point I would expect to have mediocre performance, but it runs really fast, it does save me some battery life a little bit more, at idle the battery life increased up to 13 hours, that is pretty impressive.

But still, why is my PC running very fast at this processor state, when I happen to have a very small processor in my PC? I can surf the web, work with MS Office, play music, and even watch some You Tube….. Yes the performance is lower than usual, but I just don’t get the relation of percentages to performance on my PC.