random cpu ratio drop (2600K)

[dfbhd13]

hello,

I recently Secure Erased and re-installed Win7. i installed my M\B chipset driver from my manufacturer's website (asus), after this in device manager i had an unrecognized 'SM Bus Controller', so i installed a driver from intel's website which seemed to fix it.

my 2600K is OC'ed to 4.5GHz, same as before re-installing. since running the fresh install i have noticed a constant random dipping in my cpu ratio. core temp shows it as constant :

but in cpuZ every 3-4 seconds the multiplyer drops from 45 to 16 for 1-3 seconds. this is during idle while not touching a thing.

my M\B is an asus P8Z68 V Pro Gen3 and speedstep and turbo mode are turned off.
could this be driver related, did i mess something up ?

would appreciate any tips, cheers.

 

[Lord_Kitty]

That's normal. Its a feature called Intel SpeedStep that lowers the CPU frequency to 1600MHz to save power when its not needed.

EDIT: Just saw you said SpeedStep is off. But its definitely a SpeedStep feature. I'll look into that.

 

[dfbhd13]

the thing is when speedstep is on, it sits at 1600mhz when idle, my problem is that it is spiking constantly straight from 1600 to 4500 instantly and randomly. with speedstep it also gradualy increases to 4500.