My i5 only runs at 2.64 MgHz

[idata]

Last April I built a new full size unit (Azza Solano case) with an i5 750 processor, 8gb DDR3 Ram, Asus P7P55D Pro MB. Processor temp never exceeds 40 C and I have done no overclocking. XFX Radeon 5770 graphics card (again no overclocking) and the temp also does not go over 40 C. I have 2 WD Green hard drives for storage, a 320 WD Blue for Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit and my programs and a 2 TB WD Blue for data on which I am currently working. Until last week, my CPU registered at 2.67 MgHz and then went down to 2.64. I am concerned that this is indicative of a problem somewhere that I would like to take care of before I suffer a crash and burn. Any ideas?

Thanks.

[DSilv11]

You may be going in to a IDLE STATE power saving mode if the system is at idle, (I would expect it to clock lower that 2.64 even depending on your power configuration settings). You should also see it go into turbo boost mode with light to medium usage up to 3.2g. http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=42915 http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=42915

Turbo boost is opportunistic. If you have thermal head room, wattage head room and good mother board imon design and enabled in power managemet it will clock up.

[idata]

I rechecked the processor last night after two hours of photo and video editing and it was down to 2.53 and has stayed at that level, so I don't think it has to do with it being in idle state or power saving mode. I do have Turbo Boost activated in Bios, but have never seen anything to indicate that it has been activated. I mostly do photo and video editing, and even with 5 or 6 programs running at the same time, I do not think I am even beginning to tax the system; every so often during a session I check the CPU (and RAM) activity in Task Manager and it is rare that any of the processors register up to 50% usage. Of course everything I have is backed up (and I mirror the drive containing the OS and programs weekly to an external), but I cannot afford to go down while waiting for a warranty replacement if not absolutely necessary. Interestingly, when I run the performance test it has maintained the 7.2 score and has not deviated from my initial testing six months ago. Is there any way to see if the processor or the motherboard are defective or are starting to fail, or are there other alternative reasons for this behavior for which I can test about which you are aware?

[RGiff]

Do you have CPUz installed on your machine , with that program you can watch the CPU throttling up an down depending on load . It's a free download but very helpful in monitoring the CPU.

[idata]

I took your advice as well as activating the performance monitor in control panel in W7 Ultimate. I believe you may have been right in your original response. Based on the performance graph and numbers at which I looked, it appears that if I run my usual programs simultaneously, I am neither taxing my RAM nor my CPU. Although I find this hard to believe based on machines I have built in the past, (my last was almost 4 years ago using Vista 32bit with 4GB DDR2 RAM), it seems that the technology I used in building and configuring this machine is far superior to that I last built and is far more than I really needed. I guess at this point I can only keep monitoring the effect of my usage on both my processor and my RAM and see if it shows any further degradation in the numbers. I do find it strange that as I have been using it more often for more complex tasks, it is using fewer of the computer's resources.

[DSilv11]

We call that Moores law's

In 4 years you get ~ 8x the horsepower

[idata]

I am very familiar with Moore's law and am even more familiar with the bloat phenomenon. After Millenium was out a few months I loved the features offered but was also aware of the criticisms and problems. I built my M machine based on the bloat theory and removed all but essential programs from start up and went to an icon system. (It takes a few seconds longer to boot programs, but once booted, they have always run very quickly. The same is true for this W7 build. It takes a couple of seconds to boot a program from an icon, but once up, it reacts almost instantly. Even if I shut the program down and restart it, it then restarts with almost no wait time.) I am probably one of the few who loved Millenium and never had a problem. This became s.o.p. for me and when I built machines for XP and Vista (both of which are still quite fast and fully functional). I did the same thing without thought-just believing that was the more appropriate methodology. I had forgotten about that until a few days ago when I downloaded and ran PC Wizard. I surprised myself as to how few programs were active when I thought I was running at full bore. Over the last two days I have been working as normal but have had the CPU and RAM meters active from the Wizard. No matter what I did or how many of my somewhat sophisticated periperals I had active at the same time, the meters showed very little action by the CPU and even the RAM only moved between 2 and a little over 4 GB. The Wizard showed my CPUs running at 1.02, about 1/2 the speed of my 2 duo core Pentiums on the XP and Vista. My last question then is whether the i5-750 will only put out the power it needs, i.e., if it needs more it goes into Turbo Boost mode and if I am really not taxing it, will they correspondingly decrease? If this is the case, then my question is answered. If this is not the case, then I assume I have a problem somewhere.

BTW, thank you in advance for your assistance.

[DSilv11]

yes,

Intel Speed step will allow the system to clock down to a slower speed if the CPU power is not needed. (save $$)

Turbo boost will allow the processor to over clock safley under certin conditions.

Those are 1) you have therimal head room & 2) the total package power is as established by the imon curve is in range.

In pratice this usualy works out to one or more cores are idle, the other cores can over clock.

If you start working it hard, it will likley drop to the package rated speed.

CPUID makes a couple tools that are handy for showing the turbo boost operation. http://www.cpuid.com/softwares.html http://www.cpuid.com/softwares.html

Tmonitor will report the indivual core usage per CPU.

[idata]

Thank you for your help. I built this machine from October, 2009 until it was fully online in April. I mapped out what I wanted and waited for sales and spent at least a couple of thousand less than list for the individual parts, which is probably why it is so overbuilt (not that this does not make me extremely happy). I mention this because I still get sales emails and received one for a new WD Black 640GB with a 64 cache (build date last month) for about 1/2 list price. Yesterday I cloned my old drive 320GB (a WD blue with 16 mg cache, and "old" is apparently a very relative term since it had a build date of earlier this year) to the new one. Instead of checking out each program individually as I would normally do, I opened and ran all of my usual programs simultaneously, which I had done last week with the "old" drive with the PC Wizard CPU meter running (which is a program from the site you recommended) and it showed very little movement on the Wizard's CPU meter. When I did this yesterday, the meter went into rapid motion, going from a low of below 2 to above 3.1. Based on what you have said, this is what it should have been doing from the beginning. This leads me to wonder if my original main drive was not sufficient for the rest of the machine. I also noticed that the CPU temp still did not go over 40 C and the MB over 30 C. I attribute this to the fans and air flow of the full size Azza Solano (which with its blue leds almost looks like an airport landing strip at night), as well as to the efficiency of the CPU's Corsair HP-50 liquid cooling system. Of course the W7 performance scores for the hard drive and processor remained the same, but based on other discussions I researched prior to posting this string, I did not expect them to change since I did not change any configurations.

The last thing I did was to clean up the registry. With my prior 32bit processors I use Microsoft's Live OneCare's registry fix with great success, but it does not work with a 64 bit system. After reading various recommendations (both expert and users), I chose a free one, Advanced SystemCare. Since I do my own maintenance weekly, I only ran its registry cleaner. It reported over 500 "errors," but about 450 were as a result photos and videos that I had completed and moved to my internal storage and external backups and a few were from deleted programs. Although I observed a barely discernbile increase in speed just from installing the new hard drive, I saw no difference from the Registry cleaning.

In any case, thank you for your assistance, guidance and patience. I am concluding that a combination of Moore's law, my reaction to bloat and a possible issue with my original main drive (not to mention my ignorance in not knowing that the i5-750 would go down as well as up depending upon its load) created an issue in my mind that did not really exist. Moore notwithstanding, it is truly remarkable how far technology has come since my first build in 1985 (when there were no hard drives nor mice) and even from my Vista build, four years ago.

Thank you again. For persons such as myself who depend on their computers and have enough knowledge to do what they need, but do not know the technological intracacies, you provide a invaluable service, for which I am greatly appreciative.

[RGiff]

I can see you have put alot of time and effort into your machine . Now if you realy want to get the full performance out of it , Get a Intel 160gb SSD , I did a similar build cherry picked all the parts and could not get a WEI score out of 5.9 . Than I did some reading on how windows scores sys. and as long as you have a regular HD you can't get above 5.9. When I installed the SSD , Now I have ( 7.4,7.4,7.4, 7.7, ) Not to shabby. But my point is the SSD made the difference.

[DSilv11]

Rats, Robert beat me to it.

I don't know if you need more speed, but an SSD will give yet another noticeable speed boost especially during boot up.

[idata]

Having been at this game for so long, (I remember the big deal when they came out with 20 mg hard drives like it was yesterday), it is most satisfying to see that there are persons such as yourselves who are ready and so willing to help people like me, who know enough to get by, but do not have the technical expertise to answer what are really basic questions. (I did read many white papers during my research, little of which I fully understood.) Unfortunately, an SSD is not yet in my budget. In fact a majority of my programs are still running at 32 bit and a couple that have come out with 64 bit versions are out of my current price range. (The price for one of my photo editing programs in a 64 bit format cost almost as much as my entire build.) My main concern was as a result of my not understanding what you phrased the "opportunistic" nature of my processor. I wanted to make sure that the lower processing speeds did not indicate an impending failure of a significant component.

My prior buiilds have lasted long after their technological life span: my Millenium build is still functional, but retired; my XP build is still being used by a close friend who is extremely happy with it; and my significant other loves my four year old Vista build, which was my main computer until this one was complete. (Of course I have taught them how to maintain the software and keep the OS's clean and green and I have updated their hardware when needed.) A good example of the types of trade-offs I made is in choosing the i5-750 with the Asus pro MB over an i7-9xx with an extreme MB, so I could fit two BluRay burners into my budget and be able to put 50GB per disk into storage. I trust that when I am ready for my next build, hard drives with platters, quad core processors, etc., will have been relegated to legacy status. In the meanwhile, measuring the differences in computing times in milliseconds or less is not as relevant as having a machine whose computing times are close to the appearance of instantaneous, is reliable, and is able to handle anything that I can throw at it. That said, an SSD is an extremely attractive upgrade.

[DSilv11]

I have systems with & without the SSD.

The most noticeable feature with the SSD is the POST time is almost 1/2 ( but I tend to agree its not worth a lot of $$$ to save 15 to 30 seconds.)

If your running HDD intensive actives, the speed comes in nice. But like you, for my main home system, I am waiting for the TOCK where it will be bigger & faster and cheaper.

( I date back to paper tape and punch cards. My first HDD was a massive 5 Megs and weighed ~ 100 lbs and ran on my system using Iron CORE memory)

[RGiff]

Well Doc it also helps with stuff like Video rendering , flie converision. It's about Ins and outs the faster you can do that the quicker you get your work done . Last night I did a slide show for someone using Adobe PhotoShop. With a std.HD this would have taken two Hrs, and I did this in 40 Min. , It's realy alot faster Read/Writes/ IOPS . A std.HD 12Ms a SSD 0.04Ms Big difference.

[idata]

I can certainly appreciate cutting down batch processing with any one of a number of programs in the Adobe Master Suite, and particularly in some of Roxio's video editing, among other programs for people who depend only on those programs. However, having seen the evolution of these and other programs that do the same things at varying speeds and efficiency, I have developed work flows that take advantage of the quickest of functions of the several programs which accomplish the same things. The question, aside from price, is the capacity of the SSDs to handle my OS and programs on one disk. 160 GB main drive would be close to capacity with little room to grow, particularly as before running newer software, I don't delete the old until I am sure the new can accomplish what I need. In addition to this, calculating the savings price per hour does not yet appear to be cost effective. I still get my vendor emails daily and if I see a SSD with sufficient capacity and affordable price, I would not hesitate to give it a go. Those performance stats are quite impressive. I just wish there was a way to see their effect real time, without having to make the investment.

[RGiff]

You only use the SSD fro program files you get a std.HD like a 2TB wd RE-3 for storage and keep all your pictures and music and all other Docs. on the B Drive. don't store anything on the SSD. That's the way I've got mine set-up it works fine I have win 7 64 bit and about 35 other programs on the SSD and it's only half full.

[idata]

I already have 1 640 GB hard drive just for my OS and programs (I have over 50 that I actively use and some additional are reserved for custom work, but only the ones essential for booting are in the startup, the rest are icon driven as needed). I upgraded from a 320GB this past weekend as I like to have at least 100 free GB on my main drive; I have 1 2TB drive for work in progress, 2 2TB drives for completed work that has not been printed, recorded or posted 1 1TB external that I use for main drive mirrors, and 2 2TB externals to back up all of my data, whether in progress or completed. Completed work is burned to BluRay for storage. As stated, I have a lot, but I run only those programs needed at the time. With the volume through which I go, an SSD sounds like a dream, but I have not seen one that is size compatible or cost effective. As much as I have tried, bloat has me by the throat based on the wide variety of audio/visual work that I do. Is there a way to replace my 1 TB drive for work in progress to a partitioned 2 TB drive, 1/2 of which I can use to load programs that the SSD would run? That would be the only way I could see getting away with a main drive that small.