Real Temp - New temp program for Intel Core processors

[unclewebb]

punkrockpolak: As long as you understand what the C0% meter is telling you, it can be useful on a laptop. For comparison, I have a T7200 that shows a C0% number of 10% when the CPU is idle. It idles at (6.0x166MHz) 1000 MHz.

A more modern P8400 supports Super Low Frequency Mode (SLFM) which means the multi can drop down to 3X at idle so that's equivalent to (3.0x266MHz) 800 MHz. It also supports a feature where internally, it can ignore half the clock pulses so it's really only running at 400 MHz. It can use C3/C6 which the T7200 I have doesn't support so when a P8400 idles down, it has to work like hell when it is awake to process the background tasks because it is effectively running so slow and is going into sleep mode half the time. The Task Manager load meter will show 0% or close to it when this is going on but that's only telling part of the story. The C0% might be up in the 60% range on a P8400 which at least gives you some idea of what's really going on inside the CPU. I think both load meters tell you something so I included both of them.

randomizer: I was helping a user the other day and suggested that he should try enabling C3/C6 so his multiplier could reach its highest value. He wasn't planning to overclock the BCLK so I thought this might give him a little boost in performance. He didn't like it.

He thought his system felt less responsive. On his i7-920, enabling C3/C6 allowed his average multiplier to go from 21.0 to 21.3 while running a single threaded bench like Super PI. 133MHz BCLK x 0.3 is only equivalent to a 40 MHz boost. Not only did he not see an increase in performance, he was losing performance in Super PI. He seemed to have a lot of Vista baggage interfering with his testing but even best case, you're not going to see a huge difference in performance if your multi is only changing by an average of 0.3.

I haven't played with C7 so I can't say what the results would be. You might save a tiny amount of power and maybe your cores will idle a degree cooler.

It's up to each user to test these things out and see if they provide any benefit. When overclocking, most motherboards don't drop the core voltage at idle so a lot of these power saving features are not that useful for the typical XS reader.