i7 860 -- Problem with speed step/turbo boost?

M

MrNCQ

New Member
I am a proud owner of a i7 860, running at stock speed (so I thought until yesterday). Until now I was satisfied with the performance of the system, especially as my new HD5870 just arrived. ;)

Yesterday I checked the core frequency and found out that it never runs at the frequency it is supposed to. It should reach 2.8GHz without turbo boost, and >3GHz if turbo boost is active. Sadly, I can never see higher speeds than 2GHz, even under full load.

All energy settings of Windows are set to high performance.

I used Argus Monitor to check and these are the results:

argus_monitor_core_fre6meh.png


The multiplier never exceeds 15, but it should reach 21 if the CPU is under load -- this is how it looks when I run prime:

argus_monitor_core_mulewvl.png


All multipliers are fixed at 15 under load and go down to 9 when the CPU is idle. I thought it might be a temperature problem, but the temps are fine:

argus_monitor_core_tem0k7s.png


Right now, I have no explanation and am kinda stuck with my search for an expanation.
 
Have you tried looking at this program when you are doing something CPU intensive? It's probably Intel SpeedStep slowing down your CPU to save energy when it isn't being used.

My advice is to look at this program with a bunch of other stuff open: firefox, windows media player, maybe a movie or some photo editing and see if it goes up to 2.8ghz.
 
Yes, the relatively 'high' temperatures are due to the fact that I was putting load on my CPU by running prime95.
 
I gave Y-Cruncher a try, but the results are the same. I never saw a multiplier of more than 15, but CPU temps reached very high values almost 60 °C (135 deg. Fahrenheit). I would not have expected a difference though, because prime95 also put a lot of stress on the CPU, at least it should have been enough to have it step up to the maximum multiplier.
 
A week ago I updated the BIOS of my Gigabyte GA-P55M UD2 to the newest version (F4) and did load the 'optimized defaults' afterwards. This should be enough (so I thought), but during the next boot I will check if everything is set up correctly.
 
Go into Bios and then CPU frequency. In there there is a setting to set the multiplier. Just type in 21 and save. When you updated your bios it might have reset your settings.
Also, looking at that image it looks as if turbo boost might be switched off. In the CPU Frequency there's an option to set it to "Auto". Though, I find the i7s perform well enough without needing turbo boost.
 
now its working properly

Ok, I got it working -- it was indeed a option in the BIOS that was set up incorrectly (even though I had loaded the optimized results after updating the BIOS).

There was an option to set the CPU multiplier and this was set to 15. I changed it to the correct value (21) and now it is woking properly.

Here is how it looks like in Argus Monitor now, when the system is under full load (I am running y-cruncher in 'stress test' mode):

argus_monitor_workingfwb8.png


Today I updated to BIOS F5 for my Gigabyte GA P55M UD2 and after loading the optimized defaults the multiplier setting has the correct value.
 
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