Practical underclocking and 45nm K10 lower limits

[zir_blazer]

2C temperature change during load lol

Actually the delta is 6°C, because my Idle is 23°C, while Full Load is 29°C, but I didn't let the temperature go lower than 27°C as I was playing games before opening CoreTemp then running CineBench. Also, we are in winter in Argentina, and my Case is also a cheap generic piece of junk with no Fans on it (But similar to what you would expect from a fully passive cooling computer).

Cinebench has an engine from the real world 3D application: CINEMA 4D.

But the scores are pretty much meaningless because they aren't representative of how other things do, or general system usability or responsiveness. It could be useful to compare general system performance against other machine, but it doesn't tell me how much tangible such difference can be for me, as for my feels everyday usage reachs a performance cap even on budget computers.

My Windows XP SP3 boots usually with 16 or 17 Threads, though after stabilizing on Idle it keeps just 15. Its extremely clean considering that the installation is more than one year old, and it could be four years old already if it wasn't because the previous two installations catched an EXE infector virus (My mother executed an infected file in my machine that she transfered on a Pendrive) that forced me to reinstall, and delete tons of things included executable ZIP or RAR format files (The autodecompressable ones).
General applications include Windows Messenger Live 8.5 that is always running, Firefox pretty much always running too but on Idle (With the exception that I browsing like on a Forum with a lot of open Tabs), and also gaming with old games that includes Warcraft 3 (DOTA), zDoom port of Doom with custom WADs, Ultima Online (Classic client on a Freeshard), Ragnarok Online, Freelancer (Not anymore though), Teamspeak or Ventrilo, Dolphin (Nintendo Wii emulator, I usually play Final Fantasy 4: The After), and that pretty much covers everything that I currently do. At 1 GHz, everything seems as fast as in my old A64 (And for most things it wasn't that faster than my old AXP Palomino). Besides, there are chances that for more recent and heavy games, all them should be GPU bottlenecked by the integrated Radeon 4200 before even complaining about the Processor.
With the exception of Dolphin, as I didn't tested it on my old A64, everything runs pretty much the same, though the system feels more responsible under heavy load (Example, if I am on Windows Desktop talking by MSN while Warcraft 3 loads a map on a multiplayer match on the background goes basically unnoticed, while in my A64 it had an slighty freeze when it started to load). The only moment when I actually needed the 2.6 GHz was when running a Spear of Destiny mod on DOSBox (End of Destiny) that forced me to run it on nominal to have it perform on real time.
However, pretty much Hardware components these day are an overkill in performance for common usage, and that is very good for the common consumer. So that is why I aim for being just above the tangible performance cap, and use the extra margings for lowering Frequency and Voltage to aim for lower power consumption and the possibility to run it on passive cooling. There is a massive difference on raw power on what you can do actually do on low power modes compared to nominal or overclocked, yet still they are pretty confortable for most things.