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

Netoman, what did your testing conclude?  It would be helpful to know.  Thank you!  I hope you recall, this was posted a year ago.  Thanks!

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.

If I understand this correctly, processor states allow the CPU to automatically downclock if it preserves power. Continuing on from this assumption, your cpu might not be able to clock itself to 1% of normal and might therfore be switched to default settings or the lowest setting possible. Which would explain your performance.

Answer 5

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.

What is the downside then of having a low minimum state set?  I assume that the CPU runs at the max state on demand.