Tuning Cool'n'Quiet: Maximize Power And Performance, Part 2

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Status
Not open for further replies.
Great Stuff. Keep up the good work. This is the type of review that will keep me coming back. How about throwing in the ever popular 720 BE and the new 620 or 630 just for giggles?
 
[citation][nom]jedimasterben[/nom]I'd be interested to see the tests performed on Windows 7 to see what the effect of reducing thread "jumping" would be.[/citation]

I was thinking the same thing as well.

Also, were the BIOSs all updated? The asynchronous clocks problem you're experiencing with Athlon II X2 was supposed to be fixed with updated CPU microcode.
 
I must admit that lately AMD is impressive. I got a PII X3 720 BE unleashed at PII X4 20 fully stable with an Asus M4A78T-E latest BIOS. Let simply add that my 2 radeon 4850 OC in Crossfire are running as fast as 2 stock 4870...

If you take into account that the 2 cards only cost 82$ each for a total of 165$ for the two... I can hardly believe that so little money can give so much results.
 
With my Phenom X4 9650, I found Cool n Quiet to be pretty much worthless without tweaks. There were huge performance drops across the board, especially with tasks that didn't use all four cores, or only loaded cores partially. Videos and games would stutter and skip every couple of frames, compressing files would take longer etc. I basically had a 1.1 GHz CPU that would sometimes run at 2.3 GHz, if it felt like it. Too bad there was no tweak guide available then. I just disabled CnQ which solved all problems but made the system use more power and run hotter.

With my 955BE, I haven't really had a need to tweak CnQ. It might cause a slight performance hit in some rare cases, but generally when I need a 3.2 GHz CPU, that's what it delivers.
 
For this test, we've selected a 616MB folder full of files (the installer for Adobe Photoshop CS4)
Click to expand...
Bad choice. You are "compressing" already compressed files.
A better choice would be to copy 600 MB from windows "program files" folder, and play with it.
 
[citation][nom]marraco[/nom]Bad choice. You are "compressing" already compressed files.A better choice would be to copy 600 MB from windows "program files" folder, and play with it.[/citation]

Bad choice if you're trying to compress file, but not a bad choice if you're just trying to stress a CPU. It will still have to do a whole lot of calculations regardless of the files.
 
Thank you very much for this article. It came at the perfect time for me. I’ve just upgraded from a 65 watt AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600 to the AMD Phemon II X3 720. Since I’m running a fanless CPU heatsink (ZEROtherm BTF95) I was concerned that the 95 watts of power of the 720 would be too much for the BTF95. I was planning on underclocking the CPU in order to approximate what I thought the heatsink could handle. However with the help of the article I don’t need to underclock it at all. Using the chart of the 710 I estimated some beginning settings for the 720. While I may be able to further lower the voltages I’ve stressed test my current settings by running a program called the Intel Burn Test plus an immoderate amount of Borderlands.

The 720 seems to have four p-states. The defaults were 1.25/1.15/1.05/.95 I am currently running the CPU at 1.15/1.125/1.0250/.9 I really haven’t thoroughly stress tested all the possibilities so I expect I may still be able to optimize further P-states one through three.

The timing of this article was excellent for me and I appreciate all the information I’ve gotten at Tom’s Hardware Guide all these years.
 
Typo! Phenom II X3-X4 720-965 only have 6MB of L3 cache, not 8MB. Not a big deal but for a second there I though the 955 had more L3 cache than my 965.
 
[citation][nom]melangex3[/nom]Great Stuff. Keep up the good work. This is the type of review that will keep me coming back. How about throwing in the ever popular 720 BE and the new 620 or 630 just for giggles?[/citation]

YES PLEASE!!!! :)
 
Hello,

We've updated this article (and the first part) with results from an AM3 motherboard and an Athlon II X4 620. The p-state settings we tested with the Athlon II X4 620 can be found in the first part (along with some power consumption numbers).
 
Many users opted for the Phenom X4 940 to steer away from a motherboard and RAM expense.
I wonder how one of those rigs would stand up to identical scrutiny.
 
this article is nice help to me.
I was searching for something like this.
you have tested the Athlons, Athlon II X2/X4, Phenom II X3/X4.
I would have liked to see some tests for Phenom II X2. as essentially this one is a Deneb with 2 cores disabled and a lower 80W TDP istead of 125W tdp.
it would have given some idea on how much disabling the cores save us power.
hope thats included in your next update.
 
Question for Tom's: Which Phenom II X4 945 processor did you use? AMD sells a 95W TDP version for almost the same price as the 125W TDP version. If you are interested in powersavings, that's clearly the one to buy. It should offer lower power usage with stock settings. And who knows how low you could take it, since it's a binned part. That would have been worth testing given the negligible price premium (less than $5 typically) compared to the 125W TDP version.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom