Phenom II 940BE running only at 800MHZ suddenly

[pinkeyed]

System Specs:
ASUS M3A79-T Deluxe Motherboard
AMD PhenomII x4 940 Black Edition; Stock Cooling
4gigs 1066mhz OCZ Reaper DDR2 Memory
Sapphire ATI Radeon4870 1GB Video Card
Corsair 750TX 750Watt Power Supply
Operating System: Windows 7RC build 7100

System was built in February of this year, no serious issues until now.

I noticed some system slowdown today and ran the CPUZ program which indicated my system was running at 800mhz with a 4x cpu frequency multiplier. At every step I used OCCT and AMD Overdrive and they all indicated 800mhz.

Cool'n'Quiet is disabled in my BIOS. Power settings in windows are set to High Performance.

Initial BIOS was 0602

I took these steps to try to solve the problem.

1) Reboot the system: 800mhz still indicated.

2) Clear CMOS via jumper: 3000mhz initially indicated, after running a game for a few minutes (3-4) noticed slowdown, and CPUZ (OCCT, overdrive) indicated 800mhz.

3) Download latest BIOS, version 1203. Booted into windows, still 800mhz.

4)Cleared CMOS again, manually entered 15x as multiplier in jumper free settings in BIOS, as well as 1.35 volts: Booted in, 3000mhz initially again, then back to 800mhz after a couple minutes of OCCT (a performance testing application used like prime95), noticed voltage was dropping to around 1.0volts as well.

5) Reflashed BIOS again to 1203, ran OCCT, same result 800mhz.

6) Rinse and repeat a number of the previous steps..

I'm at a loss at this point. From what I can tell this was never an issue before as I've never seen CPUZ or any other system monitor indicate 800MHZ until today.

I have 4 OCCT reports that show CPU activity and temperature, they illustrate very well exactly when the CPU throttles down to 800MHZ and the lower voltage. This throttling seems to occur from between 2-4minutes of near maximum cpu utilization. Temperatures reached no higher than 60degrees C on any test, 3 were below 58degrees.

Any insight to this issue would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Yukmouth]

I've seen phenoms default to 800mhz on HP/Compaq motherboards that don't properly support CPU throttling, chance's are you shouldn't be turning off cool and quiet. C & Q works, overclocked or not so there's never a reason to turn it off. No need to mess with power saving features made more for laptops in windows either.

You're effectively driving full voltage to your CPU 24/7, decreasing its lifespan in the process . Maybe your motherboard knows better than to subject your hardware to such senseless torture .

If this dose not help, its time to start researching issues specific to your Asus M3A79 and see if you can't find someone with the same problem.