Laptop Overclocks Itself?

[TurtleCrusher]

So I finally made use of my T61 and turned it into a HTPC. Runs 720P video just fine blah blah blah, but as I check CPUz to see what I'm going at, it correctly lists a T7500 @ 2.2ghz, but at load it switches its multiplier from 11x to 12x!

Its going at 2.4ghz when I'm running a game. I'm no hater on free performance, but is this typical of laptops to do this?

 

[IntelUser2000]

Since the Santa Rosa platform(965 mobile chipsets), Intel mobile CPUs had the ability to clock its cores 200MHz higher when only running one of the cores. Surprising that it actually works on your laptop though. With most people it doesn't work because Windows bounces threads and games aren't single threaded anymore, at least for the newer ones.

 

[VirtualLarry]

This is pretty neat. I always thought that "turbo boost" started with the i7. Not so, apparently.

 

[Gillbot]

I've never noticed my T61 with the T7500 do this.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

Originally posted by: Gillbot
I've never noticed my T61 with the T7500 do this.

I was running CS 1.6 and then starcraft when I saw this. It even happened a couple of times in idle.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
This is pretty neat. I always thought that "turbo boost" started with the i7. Not so, apparently.

IDA doesn't really work though(most of the time anyways). It's too reliant on the OS which switches threads even in single thread to ever activate except in the rarest cases. Anandtech and couple of other sites had an article about that. Basically with IDA, you need to set thread priority for the majority of the applications.

Core i7 moves the control to the CPU so it works.