Q: I’m a desktop PC user who recently bought a notebook.Here are the notebook’s specs:
Mobile Athlon 64 3200+ 2GHz
1,024MB of DDR333 RAM
80GB HDD
Mobility Radeon 9700
Windows XP Professional (32-bit)
I didn’t realize until about a week after buying the notebook that the machine was only running at 800MHz and not 2GHz. The multiplier seemed to be set to 4X at 1V instead of 10X at 1.55V, which I believe are the stock settings for the processor. So, using some software (RightMark’s CPU Clock utility), I set the multiplier to 10X at 1.55V on Windows startup. This software also told me the CPU temp was 60 degrees Celsius. I was concerned, so I loaded a game and checked temps there, as well. The CPU temp jumped to 75 C while gaming. I don’t understand why my notebook is running at such a high temperature at its rated speeds. Could it be a bad temperature readout? Maybe applying some new thermal paste to the CPU heatsink assembly would help?
A: This is a common problem the average enthusiast desktop PC user has that likes to tinker around, check settings, and the like. You’re not alone. Many users that have spent years on a desktop machine have fired up a notebook and thought something was dramatically wrong with their system configuration. What you’re seeing, though, is completely normal. In fact, without a certain “feature” in the notebook, there would be a significant reduction in its battery life. The feature we’re speaking of is the dynamic clock gating and voltage adjustments, which are critical technologies for mobile processors. When it’s not under workload, AMD intended for your Mobile Athlon 64 3200+ processor to drop down to a baseclock speed of 800MHz (or a 200MHz system clock times a 4X multiplier). Our guess is that you were taking this 800MHz reading on the desktop when idle. While you were gaming, the Mobile Athlon 64 was most likely running closer to its rated 2GHz spec. In conjunction with voltage and frequency control functions in your BIOS, the Mobile Athlon 64 processor will automatically throttle up to its maximum-rated frequency of 2GHz when it’s under a significant load and/or your system needs more processing power.
With respect to your heat issue at 2GHz, it’s probably due to the fact that you’re actually running the core slightly out of spec voltage-wise, which affects temperatures dramatically in the cramped notebook chassis. AMD actually designed the Mobile Athlon 64 3200+ processor to run at 1.4V, and a 10th of a volt here and there can make a big difference. If you still want to set the clock speed of your notebook’s processor manually, you can turn down the voltage to 1.4V for more reasonable thermal performance. However, we’d also suggest that you let that mobile processor do what it’s designed to do: clock down and chill out when your notebook doesn’t need it and ramp up to full tilt when it does.
