C2D E7200 and GA-G31M-ES2l...Strange behavior?

[aggiefan]

Hey guys, I built this desktop a few years ago and honestly hardly use it except for watching movies via projector,etc. Well I wanted to finally play with the M.I.T. settings but avoid OC'ing until I get some time to finish learning the basics. Anyway, in MIT, I changed the 'Performance Enhance' from 'Standard' to 'Extreme', not sure if anything else was required (no other info in the manual) or if clock speed would even change. Like I said, I've gotten rusty.

Anyway, Save and Exit out of Bios and immediately the computer shuts down. It reboots but before anything can display, it shuts down again. Then it boots and loads windows. I checked CPU-Z just out of curiosity and Cores 0 and 1 are showing about 1600mhz w/a 6.0x multiplier.

I reboot, enter BIOS/MIT and change 'Performance Enhance' back to 'Standard'. After the desktop loads, I pull up CPUZ and it now alternates every 5-10secs or so between 1600mhz/6.0x multiplier/1.12v (CPU voltage) and 2553mhz/9.5x multiplier/1.168v. Both cores are doing this. It's been so long since I've used CPUZ on this PC that I don't remember if that's normal but it doesn't seem to be. Any suggestions or input guys?

EDIT: After this post, I rebooted again, and I'm still getting the alternating 2553mhz/1600mhz but core voltage stays at 1.12v, no alternating.

EDIT2: Ok, after some searching, I'm guessing that this is the Speedstep operating, but is this still typical with nothing else running (except Firefox so that I can type this lol)? Should I disable this?

Thanks!

Jeremy (the tinkering idiot)

[Acebmxer]

Re: C2D E7200 and GA-G31M-ES2l...Strange behavior?

Yes this fluctuation is normal. This is a power saving feature. It is controlled by EIST , C1E and/or Balanced power scheme with in windows 7. You can have C1E disabled and Balanced power scheme enabled and it will work or disable power scheme and enable C1E and should still work.

If you disable EIST or speedstep and C1E and disable balanced power scheme cpuz will report full cpu speed and full voltage.

Just leave these enabled.

When cpu has no load it should use 6x multi and low vcore as load is applied cpu multi will increase and vcore will increase till set value.

[aggiefan]

Re: C2D E7200 and GA-G31M-ES2l...Strange behavior?

Thanks for the confirmation. When I'm not constantly working with things, I forget easily nowadays with too many other things going on. Anyway, any thoughts on why setting the Performance Enhance option to 'Extreme' failed to work? The GB manual doesn't list any details and haven't found much of anything searching the web. Having a 3-4year old MB doesn't help I guess....I just want to slowly speed this thing up before OC'ing and thought the Performance Enhance would be an easy, painless way to go about it. Was I wrong?

EDIT: Finally found this little nugget but not sure how to interpret it:
Actually you are both wrong and right. I checked this with gigabyte. The standard, turbo and extreme settings does the following:

Standard gives the highest memory frequency but unaltered timing values.

Turbo gives a balance between frequency increase and lower timings.

Extreme gives the lowest possible settings for timing but may actually result in a lower frequency depending on memory.

I'm guessing the Performance Enhance options don't have the same effect as the old "Turbo" button on old 386/486 machines? As in choosing Turbo won't really make a noticeable difference (or at all) without changing other settings in MIT?