2.8 Ghz CPU reporting as 1.86Ghz??

Gooch2k4

Well recently ive been getting horrible performance in games so today i decided to investigate it, so i ran CPU-Z and this is the view that greeted me:
anyone any ideas?

mathias

Some mainboards have a failsafe default setting that kicks in if something happens , like a crash.

If that is what is happening on your board , then go into the Bios and see if there is a " load optimised defaults" option. If there is , hit that , select save and exit and you should have the full speed back.

Cassiel

What your mother board make/model? Did you upgrade the chip recently?
That chip is rated to run on an FSB of 800 for which bus speed (200) x multiplier (14) would apply (2800 Mhz or 2.8Ghz).
Your motherboard BIOS is either not setup correctly or the board is not rated to run at 800FSB in which case you will have to overclock the FSB to get the rated speed from your chip.

Stephen

Are you sure its not using SpeedStep or something to save energy - i.e. clocking itself back when idle? Since it is a mobile chip and all.
Try going into power settings in the control panel and set it to high performance or something like that.

Khannie

Stephen wrote:

Are you sure its not using SpeedStep or something to save energy - i.e. clocking itself back when idle? Since it is a mobile chip and all.

This is what I was thinking.

Gooch2k4

yeah its not speedstep, i even put the system under load and checked to see if the clock speed went up then but it didnt

Anti

Did none of you see the screenshot.

Its a mobile P4.....

Which means to conserve power and lower heat it will underclock when its not being used fully. All intel chips in laptops do this. And there is no way to disable it, unless you know how to hack your bios.

Its the same as amd's cool&quiet technology

Anti

On thinking again, go into your bios, you might have the option to disable this feature.

And if infact this is not a laptop disreagard my previos comment...

humaxf1

turn off the "XP Theme". Windows runs a lil smoother with all that crap turned off. Ditch the background wallpaper.

Right click 'My computer' icon, Properties, advanced tab, performance settings button and click THIRD radio button. apply & OK. NO XP bloat now!

Gooch2k4

Anti wrote:

On thinking again, go into your bios, you might have the option to disable this feature.

And if infact this is not a laptop disreagard my previos comment...

im not able to disable it via the bios, at least i dont think i can

petes

humaxf1 wrote:

turn off the "XP Theme". Windows runs a lil smoother with all that crap turned off. Ditch the background wallpaper.

Right click 'My computer' icon, Properties, advanced tab, performance settings button and click THIRD radio button. apply & OK. NO XP bloat now!

What's that got to do with anything?

dil999

If its a speedstep issue, you should be able to adjust it in the Power Option properties in Control Panel. The clock speed adjustment is so as to increase Battery life and adjusts based on Power criteria only, not load requirement. But it should be fully configurable in Power Options.

Tom Dunne

petes wrote:

What's that got to do with anything?

Back in the good old days of Windows 95, this was standard advice to gain a moderate increase in system performance. It's not really applicable any more.

Gooch2k4 - can you confirm if this is a laptop or not?

If it is a laptop, then the manufacturer most likely will have installed some power management software. Start by checking settings there.

Gooch2k4

yes it is a laptop

petes

tom dunne wrote:

Back in the good old days of Windows 95, this was standard advice to gain a moderate increase in system performance. It's not really applicable any more.

My fault. I looked at the heading of the thread, the picture and the big red WTF.

Didn't see the first line.

8T8

As has been pointed out this is speedstep a power management tech built into Intel CPU's when idle it lowers the clock speed, this is a good thing otherwise your CPU would be very toasty all the time and cause trouble for the CPU cooler in the laptop.

I would not disable it if this in a laptop (even if you could) and if you want to see the CPU at full speed use a piece of software like prime95 torture test to put the CPU under load and you will see the CPU speed rise.

Anti

8T8 wrote:

As has been pointed out this is speedstep a power management tech built into Intel CPU's when idle it lowers the clock speed, this is a good thing otherwise your CPU would be very toasty all the time and cause trouble for the CPU cooler in the laptop.

I would not disable it if this in a laptop (even if you could) and if you want to see the CPU at full speed use a piece of software like prime95 torture test to put the CPU under load and you will see the CPU speed rise.

Christ no, dont run prime 95.....

Just download super pi, and get it to run the 32M test. Many a time has prime 95 killed a pc on me

Tom Dunne

Gooch2k4 wrote:

yes it is a laptop

And what graphics card is in it? I think this may also be contributing to the problem.

Gooch2k4

its a radeon 9700 mobility 128mb

8T8

Anti wrote:

Christ no, dont run prime 95.....

Just download super pi, and get it to run the 32M test. Many a time has prime 95 killed a pc on me

Well then something must be wrong with those PC's as it should not

He would only be running it a short moment like 30 seconds to see the CPU at max speed anyway.

Gooch2k4 wrote:

its a radeon 9700 mobility 128mb

You probably have what's called desknote, essentially a laptop that uses desktop parts hence the CPU being a P4 and the Radeon 9700.

Anyway just to re-iterate the lower clock speed when idle is normal with speedstep. If you give the CPU something to do like I mentioned with Prime or doing something like compressing files into a RAR archive and check CPU-Z you will see the CPU at it's max speed.

Oh yeah as for games performance well the 9700 is pretty old at this point depends on the type of games you are playing & the detail settings you are using ?

You'd also want to update the display driver for it if you have not done so in quite some time and performance optimizations for games are linked to updated drivers.

There are two ways of getting an update driver;
Option 1: Use ATI's own tool which will verify if you are eligible for support as the only support certain vendors laptop GPU with their driver updates (retarded I know). It may pass it may not if it doesn't use option 2.

Option 2: Download the latest ATI display driver, run it and it will extract to a folder then say GPU not supported.
Download modtool, run it and point it at the folder the ATI driver extracted to and it will modify it to support your Mobility 9700.
Now go into the ATI folder and run the setup.exe and it will install the latest display driver.

Also be aware that on battery power a 9700 will clock down to lower speeds so mains only if you want full speed, though you can over ride this in the ATI control panel in the driver.

TerrorFirmer

Anti wrote:

On thinking again, go into your bios, you might have the option to disable this feature.

And if infact this is not a laptop disreagard my previos comment...

Is speedstep not present in desktop P4's as well? I had previously assumed not myself but in my (desktop) bios I have the option to enable or disable speedstep.

Tom Dunne

8T8 wrote:

Anyway just to re-iterate the lower clock speed when idle is normal with speedstep. If you give the CPU something to do like I mentioned with Prime or doing something like compressing files into a RAR archive and check CPU-Z you will see the CPU at it's max speed.

Should Speedstep kick in if the laptop is on mains power?

I've never seen my Pentium M go to a lower clock speed on mains, only when I'm running it on battery.

Gooch2k4 - can you confirm you have it running on the mains as opposed to battery power?

8T8

tom dunne wrote:

Should Speedstep kick in if the laptop is on mains power?

I've never seen my Pentium M go to a lower clock speed on mains, only when I'm running it on battery.

Gooch2k4 - can you confirm you have it running on the mains as opposed to battery power?

Depends as speedstep was being enabled on all desktop CPU's because the P4's where too toasty & it was a handy way to limit the thermal output of the CPU.

If the laptop is a desknote as I suspect then they probably forced speedstep on at all times to control the temp of the desktop P4 CPU so it does not overheat.

astrofool

For political reasons, the speedstep on the desktop P4's never dropped them to below 2.8Ghz, i.e. silly people claiming they paid for a 3.4 processor and it says it runs at 1.8gz or whatever.

The mobile parts didn't have this restriction, it seems to have dropped the multiplier, with that bus (133mhz), you'd need a 21x multiplier to get to 2.8. Anyway, the mobile P4 was an awful chip in every way, and was quickly replaced by the pentium M.

8T8

Actually another reason why the CPU speed may be lower is thermal throttling which P4's did though I cannot recall which ones did it or not but if the CPU was too hot it would scale down the clock speed to keep the CPU running.

If the cooler inside the laptop is not as effective as it used to be for some reason that could be another theory as to why.

Rightmark's RM Clock can tell you lots about this kind of stuff showing in realtime what's happening in the background.

Cuddlesworth

Anti wrote:

Christ no, dont run prime 95.....

Just download super pi, and get it to run the 32M test. Many a time has prime 95 killed a pc on me

? If a pc can not run prime 95 then there is something wrong with it, either a design flaw or bad mount on the heatsink. That includes laptops.

DaSilva

Heres a simple solution that will probably correct it. Of course battery time will be lower and temperatures will be higher.

Go to "Power Options" in control panel, and from the drop down box select "Always On". Your chip will run at 2.8ghz.

Gooch2k4

ive tried all of the power options in the control panel and , i have also maxed out the CPU (video transcoding) and checked to see if that made any difference to the CPU speed (which it didnt). On a side note i just checked the CPU speed and its now 1.53Ghz

8T8

Can you hear the CPU fan in the notebook at all when the CPU is under load ?

Gooch2k4

yep i can indeed

8T8

Well all I can suggest is try installing RM Clock hopefully it will give you a better idea of what's going on as it will display the CPU clock in real time and if it is being throttled.

Try using Prime 95 stress testing->options->torture test & have RM Clock running the background so you can watch the CPU clock speed.

zilog_jones

I take by that hardware the laptop's a bit old? It could be full of dirt by this stage. My friend had a Dell Inspiron with a P4m and after a few years it got to the stage where it would just turn off totally from overheating, and when it wasn't turning itself off it was helluva slow (didn't think to check the clock speed at the time - didn't know the details on CPUZ changed according to SpeedStep).

Copious amounts of fluff and crap were removed from the laptop after disassembly, and after that it was grand.