AMD PhII: Undo overclock when not gaming to save power?

[KingFatty]

Hi all,

I'm wondering if it's worthwhile to undo an overclock when I'm not gaming, in order to save power?

I have an AMD Phenom II X2 555 BE, and I'm able to run all 4 cores at around 3800-3900 MHz if I want to overclock for gaming by increasing the multiplier and the base frequency (for cpu bound stuff like starcraft II etc. where it makes a difference).

But since I don't game every day, i feel like it's a waste of power to run all 4 cores at such an overclock, even though i turn on all power savers like cool'n'quiet etc., though I think sometimes those are not going to help if you exceed a certain Mhz in your overclock (verify this? is it exceeding a certain multiplier, and/or exceeding a certain frequency)?

So now I'm just running my PhII 555 chip at stock, using 2 cores at 3200 MHz, and putting up with slowdowns in starcraft II when lots of units are on the screen, moreso than if I'd kept the overclock.

But is there a way to overclock such that I can retain all the power saving features, so that my computer would be able to throttle when i'm browsing, but then have more performance available when I fire up SC2 every few days?

Am I overestimating the overclocked power consumption vs. stock power consumption, by not taking into account that the chip will throttle itself during normal browsing even if it is overclocked with all 4 cores active @ 3850 mhz instead of just 2 cores at stock 3200 mhz? Are we talking pennies a month for this type of overclock (with power saving enabled) compared to stock (with power saving enabled), or would it be a worthwhile savings to keep the chip at stock all the time?

The video card is not a factor as I'm not going to overclock the video card, just the CPU to help out Starcraft II when i play it. I'm not GPU bound, as it's a 5870 and I don't use antialiasing.

 

[sm625]

If you have cool n quiet set up correctly, it shouldnt be running at 3.8GHz all the time. It should be running at around 1100MHz most of the time, with a lowered voltage. If you run cpuz and keep the window minimized, it will show your current speed on the taskbar.

In order to really know how much your overclock is costing you, you need to plug your pc into a kill-a-watt meter and do some comparisons. Everyone should have one of these meters since they are only $20 and will save you at least that much at some point just from the information it gives you.

 

[podspi]

Can't speak about what the price difference would be, though I'm pretty sure as long as you have CnQ on and aren't doing something like running F@H all day the difference in your electric bill will probably be next to nothing.

 

[BLaber]

Make sure you have Cool & quite enabled in bios , Depending on Stepping of you Phenom II , you may or may not need to install cool & quite drivers.

I have C3 stepping PH II X2 unlocked to X4 @ 3.9Ghz & it idles at 800Mhz but shoots up when cores are loaded with task.

May be also enable c3 or c6 states that your Motherboard supports to enable deep sleep.

 

[Bacstar]

To get Cool n Quiet to work during an overclock, make sure your multiplier is 18.5x or below. I discovered this myself just last week when I was overclocking to 4ghz on my Ph II 965.

 

[superccs]

In a similar but opposite experience, I thought that I would save power and temps by disabling 2 cores of my x6 and reducing the overclock.

BUT since I had cool n quiet enabled and used stock volts, there was no benefit. So I re-enabled all the cores and set my OC back to my previous levels.

Overclocking on stock voltage is good stuff.

 

[ElFenix]

http://phenommsrtweake.sourceforge.net/
use that

 

[repoman0]

http://phenommsrtweake.sourceforge.net/
use that

+1

Great program. I do 3600Mhz@1.3V (less than stock volts ) and 1600MHz@0.85V idle (also much less than CnQ stock which only runs 800MHz) with an X4 955

edit: There is a newer version than the sourceforge one iirc.

You should set your BIOS to the overclocked settings and disable CnQ for this to function correctly. I've found that an up threshold (move from 1600 to 3600mhz) of 25% for a quad (50% for dual core) and down threshold of 15% works well.