My i3-4130 not lowering it's clocks and voltage when idling?

[stuff_me_good]

My brand new HTPC build consist 2x1GB 1333Mhz RAM, i3-4130, Asrock z87m pro4, samsung 830 128GB SSD. Case is LC-Power 3000B and it comes with 420w (LC420H-12 V1.3) power unit.

I have windows 7 x64 intalled and I have enabled in bios all power saving features that I can find. Yhat includes, C1E, EIST, C3/C6/C7 states. For some reason the processor doesn't lower it's clocks to 800Mhz like it should be and it doesn't lower it's voltage either.


Why is that? I've tweaked pretty much every option I can but no results. CPU-Z show always 3400Mhz and voltage is around 1.12. My 4770K works like charm when all those power saving options enabled.


Could it be that unknown power unit? I couldn't find any information does the PSU support those haswell advanced C6/C7 power saving modes.

 

[Durp]

Are you sure windows power setting is on balanced or the cpu section has the minimum processor state set at 5% in the advanced options?

 

[ShintaiDK]

Also make sure it actually idles. Check taskmgr.

Your PSU is unrelated to it. C6 and C7 is sleep states, not idle.

 

[BSim500]

I have windows 7 x64 intalled and I have enabled in bios all power saving features that I can find. Yhat includes, C1E, EIST, C3/C6/C7 states. For some reason the processor doesn't lower it's clocks to 800Mhz like it should be and it doesn't lower it's voltage either.

As Durp said, go into Control Panel -> Power Options -> and make sure "Balanced" is selected instead of "High Performance". (Performance is actually the same under load, the latter just disables SpeedStep). Likewise, double-check "minimum processor state" under processor power management is set to 5% as it's this that determines the Speedstep stepping when idle, and if you've changed it to 100%, then you'd have disabled it in the OS (even if it's enabled in the BIOS).

 

[stuff_me_good]

Thanks guys for the effort, but my problem still stays.

Task manager tray icon is so tiny that I didn't first see that one core is actually crunching something all the time. Taking up 15% of all my processor power. Recourse monitor indicated it is to be windows interrup process to be blamed for that. Then some googling indicated it to be some sort of hardware problem, so I reinstalled all my drivers. After reinstalling the drivers, interrup process wasn't hogging my cpu power anymore.

I also checked the power manager and it is balanced. Minimum processor state is at 5% in the advanced options, but the initial problem still stays. CPU is at full clocks at all times and doesn't go to 800Mhz 0.8v as it should go when idling.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Updated BIOS?

 

[crashtech]

There is a newer (beta) BIOS for that board, 2.00a dated 11/15/2013.

Lately I worked on a laptop that was stuck the other way, throttled down to 800Mhz all the time, and a new BIOS fixed it...

 

[Blastman]

Check the CPU vcore settings. If the vcore settings are set manually and not on Auto or Normal, the vcore will not change and the CPU will not be able to use speedstep.

 

[stuff_me_good]

I updated the bios to latest 2.10 one and I'm not sure was the problem with one of the settings I had in the bios or the bios itself. After updating I booted with default setting to see if it makes any difference and I saw the clocks changing. So now I knew that it worked.

The only thing different in the setting in the bios was only in the cpu settings. In default all the c1e, eist, c-states are in auto, but before I had them set to manually enabled. But in default bios the package(supposedly controlling the whole package like cpu, gfx, and pci-e) c-state setting is disabled, and I manually set it on C7. This could have also been the problem, can't be sure though.


But since this windows is migrated with samsung migrating tool from 256GB samsung 830 ssd to samsung 128gb 830 ssd, so processor, ram, ssd, mobo and gfx card are different. But both motherboards are z87 based, so windows worked straight away, windows automatically installed some drivers, which was quick and successfully. After that i manually installed intel gfx drivers since I had in my second computer from where I took the clone has amd gfx card. But I think because of this cloning, some driver issues are present because windows deferred procedure call and interrupt services is hogging 12% of my cpu time all day long, and because of that my cpu doesn't go to lower c-states.

I'm in the process of working this issue right now, but at least I now the cpu can go to lower c-states when I have been eradicating the current problem out.

Edit:
I ran windows update and I guess some of the new patches got rid of the interrupts problem. Now all is good and my cpu downclocks to 800Mhz 0,82v.