Is my processor running at full speed? Wierd system properties

[Pealy]

Oky, it's not state of the art but I have a compaq n410c laptop which has a P3 Mobile 1.2ghz

system properties page says:
Computer:
Mobile Intel(r) Pentium(r)
III CPU - M 1200 mhz
797 Mhz, 256MB RAM

CPU-Z reports processor speed as 797 (Multiplier 6, bus 132mhz)

Is it running at 797 instead of 1200? Can I get it running faster?

Speedstep is turned off in the bios because I want it running at full speed all the time.

[directhex]

plug it in before turning it on

then try again

[Pealy]

this is on mains power without a battery imserted at all

[gamesaregood]

Turn off all power saving Options.

[Pealy]

Turn off all power saving Options.

Control panel power options set to always on, never, never, never, never. anything else I should set?

None of the compaq specific drivers are loaded, just XP Pro SP2 from CD.

One other odd thing about the laptop is that on-board audio (MP3 in windows media player or DVD soundtrack) plays back at too high a pitch, sounds like everyone's on helium..

[alsenior]

my c610 says stuff like that all the time. when on the mains the cpu always runs at full whack. that is what the processor runs at at the lowest setting so that is what it reports but it will be running at 1.2 ghz. it's just lying to you

[dave87]

Use CPU-z to measure the CPU speed, its more accurate than windows

[kalniel]

Speedstep is turned off in the bios because I want it running at full speed all the time.

There is no performance hit to running speedstep or any other powersaving measures - if the processor is given something to do it will always do it at full speed. It only throttles back when it's idle, or when there are sufficient periods of waiting that it can idle inbetween cycles.

[Pealy]

There is no performance hit to running speedstep or any other powersaving measures - if the processor is given something to do it will always do it at full speed. It only throttles back when it's idle, or when there are sufficient periods of waiting that it can idle inbetween cycles.

I only turned speedstep off because I'm having problems with a USB soundcard and this was one of the recommended remedies (didn't work so I'll probably tuen it back on).

CPU-Z is reporting 797mhz as per first post, that's what concerned me in the first place. is it possible that my processor is being limited or am I being daft?

I'm thinking that Windows might be doing some kind of stepping down in the background so is there a trustworthy dos-version of cpu-z or maybe something which will get my cpu cooking so that cpu-z will report the full-speed??

[Pealy]

Postscript - I gave up and turned Speedstep back on in the bios. Now msinfo32 is reporting 1197mhz max.

Wierd, does this mean turning speedstep off leaves it running at 797mhz?

[awm]

Check the multiplier and bus speed. My computer randomly had the bus speed changed from 166 to 100 and that slowed down the CPU speed.

[Pealy]

Check the multiplier and bus speed.

There aren't any options like that in my Laptop BIOS, can you set stuff like this from windows?

[directhex]

boot a linux livecd, see what that reports (cat /proc/cpuinfo)

[Clunk]

I was having the same problem with mine. I turned off speedstep because it dint seem to be kicking the cpu back to full speed unless it had quite a drain of power. When I turned it off in the bios, everything showed the cpu as running at 970 or 1000mhz, except for windows itself, which would show it as 1666. I have left it turned off and it definately seems nippier.