Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Computer Question

I guess I should have put this in it's own thread...

We've got a possible issue with the 3.2Ghz P4...I ran cpu-z and it's showing up as a 3.2Ghz P4, but it's running at 2800Mhz (+/-). Any ideas? Hopefully this is an easy setting in the bios to fix. btw...what's the best message board/forum for these types of computer questions? (Though with the gang we have here I suspect I can get all my answers here as well!)

Anybody?

What does CPU-Z say the Mutliplier and FSB is? Somehow it might have gotten accidentally underclocked.

I'll have to check when I get home. I'll let you know.

hmmm...at idle is runs at 2800Mhz (+/-), but while running WoW, it toggles between 2800 and 3200.

The multiplier is reading x 14.0. And the FSB is at 200.

Does that help?

Toggles? That's odd.

It isn't a laptop is it? Sometimes they do weird throttling stuff where they drop down the speed of the processor to save battery life.

Go ahead and check what the FSB is in the BIOS.

The FSB should be 228. 228 FSB x 14 Multiplier = 3200 Mhz

Hi, This is Dennis's roomate, Matt

It sounds like Intel's SpeedStep technology is kicking in. It lowers the CPU's multiplier (200x14 instead of 200x16) in order to conserve power/reduce heat. You should be able to disable it in the BIOS if you like.

If that doesn't work, try checking your temps. Intel chips will clock themselves down in order to prevent burning out the CPU due to overheating.

If it's SpeedStep, that's fine. It seems to run at 3200 when it needs to.

I'll download a cpu temp monitor when I get home.

btw...my 2.4Ghz P4 runs at about 42 degrees at idle and jumps up to about 55 degrees when running WoW. How hot it too hot? I read that the P4's max temp is 70 degrees.

That sounds about right for a Prescot. I understand that the Northwood cores run around 25C at idle, but then again, that's with 18C ambient temps.

55c is fine. 70 is the rated max but, uh, some unknown people have run theirs at 100c for hours at bus speeds over 225 MHz when overclocking. A bump in core voltage here, a higher bus speed there, pretty soon your talking real blowtorch range. Intel really slipped up on the P4 series. Never did perform up to expectations. Original P4s couldn't beat P3s at lower freqs and they just became less efficient and more handicapped by their memory bandwidth problems.