Incorrect CPU speed reported

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bmtaylor

System Specs:
Win2K Pro
AMD K6/2 500MHz
256MB SDRAM
Gigabyte GA-5AX Motherboard

During intitial boot-up the speed is reported correctly
but under Windows it is only being spotted under dxdiag as
a "~250MHz" CPU. I have downloaded the cpuid tools from
the AMD website and they confirm that the CPU is a 500MHz
spec, yet some of the other cpuid programs take thier cue
from window and only spot it as a 250MHz

I have all the latest BIOS updates that I can find for
this motherboard, and I have all the updates fropm the
windows updates link, tet this problem still persists.

Regards,
Brian Taylor
 
System Specs:
Win2K Pro
AMD K6/2 500MHz
256MB SDRAM
Gigabyte GA-5AX Motherboard

During intitial boot-up the speed is reported correctly
but under Windows it is only being spotted under dxdiag as
a "~250MHz" CPU. I have downloaded the cpuid tools from
the AMD website and they confirm that the CPU is a 500MHz
spec, yet some of the other cpuid programs take thier cue
from window and only spot it as a 250MHz

I have all the latest BIOS updates that I can find for
this motherboard, and I have all the updates fropm the
windows updates link, tet this problem still persists.

Regards,
Brian Taylor
Click to expand...

So you have utilities that don't agree on the speed of your CPU. Now who are
gonna believe - the manufacturer, or Windows? Boot DOS from a floppy, and run
a DOS CPU speed meter utility. That will tell you what's actually going on.
Don't run the DOS utility from within Windows - the DOS-emulation delays can
mislead the program.

But knowing that the CPU is actually ticking along at 500MHz doesn't tell you
very much. That's its "clock speed." The "effective speed" of a CPU will not
be the "clock speed". Lots of technical reasons for that, the main one being
that almost all operations take two or more clock cycles to complete. BTW,
you can "over clock" your CPU if you supply sufficient cooling.

Furthermore, the speed of the system overall depends on a number of other
factors - front bus speed, sizes of various caches, amount of RAM, etc, but
_most of all_ the operating system. Windows is notoriously slow - Intel's
speeding up of the CPU has barely kept pace with the increasing complexity of
Windows. You will see what I mean if you run some plain old DOS programs in
real DOS (not in a DOS window within Windows) on modern fast hardware. :-)

HTH
 
Wolf Kirchmeir said:
So you have utilities that don't agree on the speed of your CPU. Now who are
gonna believe - the manufacturer, or Windows? Boot DOS from a floppy, and run
a DOS CPU speed meter utility. That will tell you what's actually going on.
Don't run the DOS utility from within Windows - the DOS-emulation delays can
mislead the program.

But knowing that the CPU is actually ticking along at 500MHz doesn't tell you
very much. That's its "clock speed." The "effective speed" of a CPU will not
be the "clock speed". Lots of technical reasons for that, the main one being
that almost all operations take two or more clock cycles to complete. BTW,
you can "over clock" your CPU if you supply sufficient cooling.

Furthermore, the speed of the system overall depends on a number of other
factors - front bus speed, sizes of various caches, amount of RAM, etc, but
_most of all_ the operating system. Windows is notoriously slow - Intel's
speeding up of the CPU has barely kept pace with the increasing complexity of
Windows. You will see what I mean if you run some plain old DOS programs in
real DOS (not in a DOS window within Windows) on modern fast hardware. :-)

HTH
Click to expand...

What I'm trying to figure out is why Windows reports a CPU at only half it's
rated speed. If it came up with something like 495MHz, for example, then I
wouldn't be so concerned as it would be near enough to the rated speed. I
only used external utilities to see if they reported back the same info as
Windows or whether they found the CPU at it's rated speed.

According to PC Wizard 2004 (www.cpuid.com) my FSB is 100MHz (thats what the
MB manual says as well), yet this CPU-Z program not only reports the CPU at
half speed, but also my systems FSB as well.

I've also posted this to the amd.com processor tech board, the topic can be
found on this link:
http://forums.amd.com/index.php?showtopic=2618

Regards,
Brian Taylor
 
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