Looking to extend the battery life on your ASUS Z71V notebook? By manually undervolting your notebook we found you can gain an extra hour in battery life on the ASUS Z71 series of notebooks.
With our notebook running at "max performance" we did a test at idle without using the system for 30 minutes. The Intel 770 processor was running at 2132MHz at 1.356V during monitoring.
Stock Temperatures @ Idle
At these stock settings we idled at 58C on the processor, 66C on the Geforce 6600 video card, and 40C on the 80GB hard drive. The estimated battery life at idle was only 2 hours and 31 minutes.
In order to reduce temperatures and increase battery life I used the Centrino Hardware Control (CHC) utility to reduce the voltage and multiplier to the processor. By setting the CPU to run in "Dynamic Switching" mode I was able to run the processor at 800MHz (6x multi) and lower the voltage all they way down to 0.700V (was 1.356).
Under-Volting Temperatures @ Idle
As you can see by the above image we were able to reduce the idle temperature on the processor from 58C to 47C by enabling Dynamic Switching and lowering the voltages. Battery life went from 2hr 31min to 3hr 34min, which is a huge difference.
All these tests were completed on the stock thermal pads that came pre-installed on the factory heat sinks. Check back later and see what the temperatures do with them removed and Arctic Silver applied.