Software cooling

[Hulka]

Does software cooling hurt performance? In other words am I better off not running cooling at a lower clock speed, or running cooling at a higher clock speed? It is called "cooling" and it came with asus probe software. I have an asus cuv4x and celery 700. 128 generic pc100 ram.
Sorry if it is a dumb question but I am new to overclocking and I don't want to F anything up here. The only thing I use my computer for is gaming so if a cooling program hurts game performance forget it. Great forum it has been a big help so far.

Hulka

[Tim-]

I have used Rain and CPUIdle with good success. They work by adding shutdown states on the CPU when it can support them. When applications are using the cpu they don't do anything.

[sleddog]

Tim- (Feb 26, 2001 10:13 p.m.):
I have used Rain and CPUIdle with good success. They work by adding shutdown states on the CPU when it can support them. When applications are using the cpu they don't do anything.

Perhaps I should not argue with a senior member, :) but I don't entirely agree.

CPUIdle can have an affect when other programs are running. An example: without CPUIdle, using the MS Word 97 spell checker (the manual one, not the as-you-type one) through a long document will cause Word to use 99% CPU. When CPUIdle is loaded and active, spell-checking the same document shows Word using less than 10% CPU. The balance (90-95%) is used by CPUIdle.

On my Celeron 600@900 spell-checking a very long document without CPUIdle will put my CPU temp up maybe 5C. With CPUIdle loaded, the CPU temp doesn't change. The performance of the Word spellchecker is not affected.