what does maximum cpu frequency mean?
whoever,hey
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Ok i know what it means in theory.
But in vista in the reliability and performance monitor, what does the CPU, maximum frequency mean?
On my quad its about 66% but it goes down, hence the max means what.
On my mates dual core lappy i'm fixing, its 100% bar dropping a couple all the time.
But then actually CPU usage is in single figures.
But in vista in the reliability and performance monitor, what does the CPU, maximum frequency mean?
On my quad its about 66% but it goes down, hence the max means what.
On my mates dual core lappy i'm fixing, its 100% bar dropping a couple all the time.
But then actually CPU usage is in single figures.
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The underclocking basically means the PC needs to supply the CPU with a smaller voltage than normal, meaning the CPU uses less current and ultimately consumes less power and generates less heat (equals less power consumption, or for a laptop - longer battery life). AMD often refer to this as "Cool & Quiet". Intel often refer to it as "Speed Step".
The CPU usage is then a percentage of the maximum clock frequency (so, say your CPU is clocked down to 1.0Ghz, and Resource monitor reports 10% CPU usage - theoretically you are using 10% of the processing power available of a 1.0GHz CPU).
For your quad core, I would imagine it would take a hell of a lot of stuff to be running on your PC to actually need all 4 core's to be clocked up to the rated speed - hence why you probably rarely see 66% or above as the maximum frequency. For your mate's laptop, if maximum clock frequency is 100% all the time then there must be something running in the background demanding heavy CPU time.
Hope this helps!
On the lappy, the cpu load was in single figures also, though the max clock freq was >=99%.
It does sound like variable clock speed though doesn't it.