FX 6300 not running at stock speeds

[Externalsense]

Hi everyone, I have a weird problem I cannot get my head around.

So for quite a while I've had an fx 6300 processor which has a stock speed of 3,5 Ghz (turbo up to 4.1Ghz).

However, recently I noticed that the processor was running at 2,4 Ghz even when performing resource-intensive tasks (like gaming).

All power saving options are disabled in BIOS and in WIndows 10 I have "high performance power plan" selected (minimum and maximum processor states are 100%).

Now the only way to get beyond 2,4 Ghz is to overclock using FSB. With FSB at 240 the clock speed is 2,94 Ghz. Again it does not go beyond that.

My motherboard is GA-78LMT-USB3 (rev. 5.0). I updated my BIOS and my WIndows 10 activation is gone so I think it worked. But the processor is still locked at 2,94 Ghz with overclocking.

I used HWMonitor to check temperatures: under heavy load the processor does not go beyond 40 degrees celsius which I think is okay, I read fx 6300 processors can work at 65 degrees with no problems.

Note that the speeds above are from windows task manager. However, CPU-z and HW Monitor report similar mumbers: 2511 Mhz with no overclock, 3000 with overclock in place.

Any idea what is happening?

 

[Externalsense]

I found a solution. It's the goddamn GA-78LMT-USB3 (rev. 5.0) motherboard. It throttles the CPU to prevent overheating, a feature called "thermal protection", which can be disabled in BIOS.

Here's the passage from the motherboard review:

Gigabyte cut corners on Rev 5.0. The board will not run a FX-6300 95W Six Core at *stock speed* without throttling (it will throttle down to 3.0Ghz during full six core load such as Prime 95, stock cooling, stock speeds). Turning off APM and Hardware Thermal Protection stopped the throttling, but temperatures were way high at stock speeds, and even at underclocked speeds. Others reported similar problems, and on the other "twin" lower end board GA-78LMT-S2P, too. Shame on you Gigabyte.