Phenom 2 - Windows XP and Cool 'n Quiet

[Spoelie]

A heads up for people running this setup, single thread performance is still severely compromised, 15% and more.

The 'fix' (all cores clock at same level) is apparantly only implemented in vista. The XP driver was never updated and since xp bounces threads around as well, single thread performance suffers.

I haven't found a solution yet (quietly hoping amd's driver team wakes up - nobody got any connections there?). There's a page here that says it found something: http://home.comcast.net/~pmc65...adf7d9ca4cfc46a7a02692

OTOH some other 3rd party tools like K10stat may be able to take over clock changing and implement it properly

 

[Fox5]

Try AMD Overdrive? I think it may have an option to lock the cores together.

 

[Spoelie]

hmm will do tomorrow after good night sleep, haven't had the best of luck yet with aod

 

[jrichrds]

A 3rd party program like K10stat or PhenomMsrTweaker is the way to go, not only for the better single thread performance but for the better undervolting control. Regular Cool 'N Quiet is good for the masses, but is way too conservative for the true undervolter (e.g. takes my X2 7750 down to only 1.05v at idle, while I have it at 0.8v with PhenomMsrTweaker). Furthermore, if you have a Black Edition CPU, these 3rd party programs allow overclocking even if you're using a motherboard without CPU voltage/frequency control in the BIOS.

Here's a quote from the PhenomMsrTweaker web page:

Replacing standard C&Q by custom C&Q may improve the run-time of single-threaded applications by more than 20% (Super PI mod 1.5 XS 1M test: 32.43 secs vs. 25.88 on my machine). Only Phenom II CPUs on Vista+ seem to use a pretty well-working standard implementation - but feel free to perform your own benches.