Some questions on thermal throttling

Philippine Mango

Diamond Member
Oct 29, 2004
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(This is a response to the "retards with computers thread". I looked at a tomshardware article and it it makes it appear as though thermal throttling only works if the system is already booted, but I'm wondering, could I boot my system from a cold boot with out a HSF for a P4? If there is thermal throttling, then why is it that we need exotic cooling solutions to be able to overclock higher?
 

MDE

Lifer
Jul 17, 2003
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It would shut down immediately if you tried that. We need "exotic" cooling because cooler chips run faster, expecially when you're pushing their limits and pumping in extra voltage.
 

stevty2889

Diamond Member
Dec 13, 2003
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Originally posted by: Philippine Mango
(This is a response to the "retards with computers thread". I looked at a tomshardware article and it it makes it appear as though thermal throttling only works if the system is already booted, but I'm wondering, could I boot my system from a cold boot with out a HSF for a P4? If there is thermal throttling, then why is it that we need exotic cooling solutions to be able to overclock higher?

If you boot up with no heatsink it will shut itself down. TM1 thermal throttling is built in to the chip itself, it will function prior to fully booting to the OS, and it can't be disabled. TM2 requires the OS, and can usualy be disabled in the bios. P4's run very hot, so exotic cooling is needed to keep the chip from overheating. And throttling kicks in sooner when you increase the vcore, which is often neccessary to get a stable overclock at higher speeds. TM1 will kick in around 72c at stock speeds. When it does, you start to take a huge performance hit. Say you have a 3ghz P4, and you overclock it to 4ghz. If it's throttling at 4ghz, it will actualy perform worse than it did at stock speeds, because it will at a minimum throttle 33%, which makes it sit idle 1 out of every 3 clock cycles, making it effectivly run like a 2.6ghz CPU.