strange multiplier on my new i7 920

[kinnth]

Hi everyone,

I just got myself a new rig spurred on with a recent deal from scan where I got the Gigabyte x58a-ud3r, 6gb of corsair ram and an i7 920 cpu.

I also got myself an asus 5870. Now I started up CPUZ and GPUZ just to check and if you look my multiplier on my processor is all out of wack. Any idea why this is and how to correct it? I am running a fresh install of win 7 prof x64



Thanks

[kalniel]

Bus speed is 133 and idle multiplier is 12, giving ~1600mhz. What's the problem exactly?

[Ulti]

Speedstep is enabled which means when the processor is idle it'll be on a lower multiplier. Run some load on the pc and it'll go to 20x multiplier for 2.66ghz or if turbo is enabled then it'll go to 21x multiplier and 2.80ghz.

[spoon_]

Speedstep is enabled which means when the processor is idle it'll be on a lower multiplier. Run some load on the pc and it'll go to 20x multiplier for 2.66ghz or if turbo is enabled then it'll go to 21x multiplier and 2.80ghz.

Beaten to it lol

Disable Speedstep and it all should be fine...

[kinnth]

Ahh I understand now.

Realistically is there anything wrong with speedstep, it must make it more energy efficient? Also is turbo mode enabled within the bios or is it automatic on the i7 920 D0?

[Ulti]

Nothing wrong with it, sometimes it messes with overclocking so you'd want to turn it off for testing overclocks then turn it back on to save energy, produce less heat etc once you've found a good setting or if you're running stock then you should leave it on. As soon as there's any load on the CPU it'll "speed back up" so yeah.

Turbo mode is usually enabled by default and is always changed within the BIOS.

[watercooled]

+1 to what Ulti said, just leave it on it saves a fair amount of power. Load the CPU somehow while in CPU-Z and you'll see it go to full clock speed, or slightly higher because of Turbo Boost which sort of overclocks cores if you're not using them all to give better single-threaded performance, for example.