[SOLVED] CPU clock

[allerion14]

Hello, I've been doing a lot of things to find out why is my cpu clock going down lately. The speed is quite random, sometimes it goes up and down. After all my research I still found nothing, I've done a lot of thing such as setting the power plan, configuring the bios, and basically all of the possibilities that I found from the answers on most hardware forums. After all the mess, I was thinking this could be my PSU and it needs to be changed, cause when I look at the voltage within HWmonitor it went up and down sometimes. For example, today it will be stable and two days later or even the next day, it will go down. Anyway, I'm using old CPU which is athlon x4 860k 4 cores up to 3.7Ghz.

 

[TerryLaze]

How do you determine this?
What are you running to measure the clocks?
It's normal for clocks to go up and down depending on what the CPU does but also depending on how hot the CPU gets.
On such an old CPU the first thing to do would be to change the thermal paste because if that was never done it will have dried out after so long causing the CPU to get hotter and thus run slower to keep within safe clocks.

 

[allerion14]

How do you determine this?
What are you running to measure the clocks?
It's normal for clocks to go up and down depending on what the CPU does but also depending on how hot the CPU gets.
On such an old CPU the first thing to do would be to change the thermal paste because if that was never done it will have dried out after so long causing the CPU to get hotter and thus run slower to keep within safe clocks.

Well I'm here to know what happen and want to know if it's normal or abnormal. Thanks to you I got my mind opened. Right after I saw your reply, I put my paste on the cpu, hoping it'll go smooth as before. I was thinking that my psu went down and something about electricity should fix the problem.

 

[mdd1963]

Clock speeds on modern CPUs can also fluctuate hundreds of times per minute depending on load/tasks running...(you may only see updates in task manager or HWMonitor two or three times per second, but, the fluctuations are happening) *Not actually sure of the behavior of the X4 processor, but, if you are seeing similar behavior in HWmonitor under Balanced power plan, it is likely normal.

Opening Notepad might cause a momentary spike to 2.5-3.7 GHz on one or two cores for .05 seconds, after which it may very well adjust itself back down to as low as 800 MHz a split second later.

Check your temps with HWMonitor. YOu can observe temps under a load as induced by CPU-Z/bench (Just click 'stress CPU', observe temps/clock speed within HWMonitor for 5-8 minutes, then hit 'stop' to drop the load induced by the CPU-Z app.

 

[allerion14]

Clock speeds on modern CPUs can also fluctuate hundreds of times per minute depending on load/tasks running...(you may only see updates in task manager or HWMonitor two or three times per second, but, the fluctuations are happening) *Not actually sure of the behavior of the X4 processor, but, if you are seeing similar behavior in HWmonitor under Balanced power plan, it is likely normal.

Opening Notepad might cause a momentary spike to 2.5-3.7 GHz on one or two cores for .05 seconds, after which it may very well adjust itself back down to as low as 800 MHz a split second later.

Check your temps with HWMonitor. YOu can observe temps under a load as induced by CPU-Z/bench (Just click 'stress CPU', observe temps/clock speed within HWMonitor for 5-8 minutes, then hit 'stop' to drop the load induced by the CPU-Z app.

I'll keep it in mind, thanks!

 

[allerion14]

Well, I have another problems now. The fan won't work if I don't nudge or poke it. I've put the new paste on the chip anyways and CPU voltage is running around 0.984V in HWMonitor even if I run a game. It usually goes around 3.x GHz, now it's stable on 1.66GHz