Why do I bother? Because it virtually triples the runtime I get out of the laptop when watching video or doing basic desktop work, and the amount of time I gain is orders of magnitude larger than the time I spend waiting on the PC (the lag is detectable, but it’s well under a second). I can write stories or alt-tab between a document and a PDF to make slides and I can still play movies and TV shows flawlessly, but it’s not particularly useful for anything else. I’m not even going to pretend that the user experience is good in this configuration, as the machine is slow enough to visibly lag.

When I travel, I’ll often tighten various amperage and power settings until the laptop is locked at 800MHz. You can check the list of supported CPUs for XTU here, but not every chip is listed - the 7700HQ itself, for example, isn’t.Īssuming you have access to XTU and you’re willing to muck around with your laptop’s power configuration (completely at your own risk), you can actually achieve some astonishing improvements at the cost of making a system incredibly slow. Some laptops may also offer UEFI options for adjusting Turbo Boost timing and parameters, though laptop UEFI is typically more locked-down than desktop parts. The advantage of using Intel’s XTU was that I got more granularity to play with the actual Turbo Boost settings, though this utility isn’t supported on every Intel laptop. I used Intel’s XTU utility for this, but there are other ways to disable Turbo Boost, including programs like Throttlestop. I figured two hours was all you could expect to get out of a gaming laptop, but since I wanted more battery for long flights, I decided to test the impact of changing the Turbo Boost parameters to see what would happen. Video playback was a bit better, but the laptop has a GTX 1060 in it, and GPU-equipped machines always use more power. When new, it got roughly two hours of battery life in normal use.

Here’s where I want to pivot and talk about my own experience with this trick.

How to enable turbo boost mac os