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

The activities you mentioned are not specifically CPU-intensive. To truly test your CPU, do something like gaming, or run a specifically-built program that tests your CPU, such as 3DMark. What you've stated simply suggests that you rarely use your CPU's full potential, as is the case with most people.

Rifdhan

Answer 4

Thanks for the reply; I’ve just lowered my processor state to 1 % minimum, & 1 % maximum, it still pretty fast, shouldn’t my PC be almost unusable at this point?

 I will probably need to get a benchmark to see what is the range of the test results between 1 % processor state & 100 % processor state on my PC, will post it once I finish the test.