Controlling your Mobile Pentium speeds in XP

[Albuquerque]

As you are likely all aware, the ol' Mobile Pentiums (P3, P4, PM) all have varying flavors of clock speed manipulation control built into them. In all previous versions of Windows (95,98,Me,NT,2000) you could use the little Intel Speedstep applet to force whatever speed you want. In WindowsXP, all of that is rolled into the consolidated power management functions... And unless your hardware provider specifically gives you their own specific clockspeed features (rare) you really can't get to that nitty-gritty raw speed level anymore.

Enter SpeedSwitchXP. :D I've raped the link from a new post over on Beyond3D earlier today ;)

http://www.diefer.de/speedswitchxp/index.html

Functionality similar to the Intel SpeedStep applet, only a LOT better. You have the basic features for someone who doesn't want to fiddle, but you also get a LOT of the "nitty gritty" hardcore tweaking options too. I'm not one for throwing things arbitrarily into my taskbar, but this has already found a home on my Thinkpad R50 and will soon find it's way onto my Thinkpad 600E. :)

[Oroka Sempai]

I could use something like this... my notebook keeps having overheating problems, and I think I will try to use this app to underclock my CPU.

[Slackfumasta]

Wuwu, can't wait to try this at home!

[Oroka Sempai]

I cant figure out how to change the processer speed...?

[Icedfire101]

thks i m going to check it right now

[ozzlo]

this only changes when and how often speedstep drops to a deeper sleep state and you cannott manually change your processor speed with this....


if you want to make your processor run slower all you need to do is disable speedstep in the bios and your comp will always run at the slowest speed possible...

[Albuquerque]

Actually, you're partially right -- this utility does manipulate how the speedstep function works. However, it also changes how the clock-stop functions work too. My 750mhz P3 Mobile only has two "real" speeds: 750 and 600. However, while using stop-clock throttling, it can cover a range of speeds outside the norms: as low as 60mhz (speedstep on, 90% throttle) to 675mhz (speedstep off, 10% throttle).

Of course, newer processors have more options for intermediate speeds, but will still also have support for stop-clock throttling. This applet isn't meant as a form of specific CPU under/overclocking utility, but rather a much more accurate way of getting XP to save power when it usually wouldn't.

I found that WinXP on my Thinkpad R50's 1.4ghz Banias P-M would run at full speed while playing DVD's. With this little applet, it pulls the processor down to 600mhz and then applies about ~50% stop clock throttling on top. It gave me almost another hour worth of DVD watching :)

[ozzlo]

hmm now i'm tempted to download it again and take another look....



*edit*
O i just noticed that it a diff version than what i used b4 :shrug: ...

[FTC]

Well, I'm having great success with the Rightmark clock (http://cpu.rightmark.org/products/rmclock.shtml) utility to directly control voltages and multipliers. I am currently lowering further my overclocked temps with this utility, after I found that SpeedSwitchXP could not do it and cpumsr was not completely stable in my system. ....

[ozzlo]

ya speedswitch is too confusing as soon as i set it to dynamic switching the laptop drops to 600 mhz even at full load... i did find that frequency reducer thingy and i managed to drop the processor to 83hz.... then I tried payin mp3 with visualizations... lets just say the lappy died... I then plugged in ac which is set to max performance and it was still 83mhz so i killed the application and it was still stuck at 83mhz so I un installed it again and rebooted....

what are your settings that you use because It always gives me strange bugs....


*edit* just started up rightmark and got it configured exactly the way I want it in less than 2 min and also dropped the voltage which has dropped my temp by 5c thanks that program rocks!!!!!! :attn:

[Oroka Sempai]

I am trying that RightMark CPU Clock utility, and played with it a bit. the only thing that I can play with is the 'On-Demand Clock Modulation'. I set it to 12.5% and I am not sure what it does. The 'Actual Clock' remains the same at 2799MHz, but the 'Throttled Clock' reports 681MHz. I am not sure what that is, but Mobmeter dont reprort a change, and there is no change in temps.

I am not completely sure about the CPU in my Laptop, but I am starting to suspect that it is not a mobile version, but a full blown P4 with HTT.

[ozzlo]

the processor stays at the same speed but just dosen't do anything for the % time you set.... i'm not sure how it's forced to not do nuthin though..... I'm pretty sure this is related to how thermal throttling works.