Energy Safe On Amd

[h90]

I have in my office 3 Athlon 2500 and 1 Athlon X2 3600 running.

On the 2500 is there any way to downclock or turn off parts of the processor when it is not used? Often the computer are just used 20 min a day but they need to be ready.

I read that the 3600 has such a feature and zilions of weired options in the bios and nothing about it in the guide. Does anyone know something?

Pretty useless to waste electric to produce heat in Thailand (or even use the aircon to blow it out).

[h90]

I have in my office 3 Athlon 2500 and 1 Athlon X2 3600 running.

On the 2500 is there any way to downclock or turn off parts of the processor when it is not used? Often the computer are just used 20 min a day but they need to be ready.

I read that the 3600 has such a feature and zilions of weired options in the bios and nothing about it in the guide. Does anyone know something?

Pretty useless to waste electric to produce heat in Thailand (or even use the aircon to blow it out).

noone likes to save energry

[A_Traveller]

In brief under or over clocking means changing the voltage & the multiplier of the CPU, which results in a decrease or increase in cycles leading to a change in processing performance and heat production.

In principal the heat will follow the curve but in realistic terms a reduction of core voltage and multiplier by 50% will create a drop of about 5C at the CPU. Since the system dissipates heat this would not be directly reflected in room temperatures by virtue of the dissipation process itself. Unless the motherboard has the ability to dynamically adjust these elements then one is faced with re-boots to change speeds.

Regards

[Guest Reimar]

In brief under or over clocking means changing the voltage & the multiplier of the CPU, which results in a decrease or increase in cycles leading to a change in processing performance and heat production.

In principal the heat will follow the curve but in realistic terms a reduction of core voltage and multiplier by 50% will create a drop of about 5C at the CPU. Since the system dissipates heat this would not be directly reflected in room temperatures by virtue of the dissipation process itself. Unless the motherboard has the ability to dynamically adjust these elements then one is faced with re-boots to change speeds.

Regards

That's not was h90 want! He want to "partly" shut down the comp for the time being the comp isn't in use, to save energy or whatever!

There several different ways how to do so!

Something very easy: the most of todays Multimedia Keyboards having the buttom to set the comp in "Sleep" mode. Even some Bios allow to set for "sleep" if the comp isn't use for some time, let say: 30 min or other and you need only to hit a key and the comp "wake up" again.

The comp goes to Standby for this time and reduces the Power consumption because the HDD stops, the CPU goes to "standby", VGA cuts and more.

So Michael, check your Bios if you can activate the Standby Mode or use a M-Keyboard. That's the easiest ways!

[h90]

In brief under or over clocking means changing the voltage & the multiplier of the CPU, which results in a decrease or increase in cycles leading to a change in processing performance and heat production.

In principal the heat will follow the curve but in realistic terms a reduction of core voltage and multiplier by 50% will create a drop of about 5C at the CPU. Since the system dissipates heat this would not be directly reflected in room temperatures by virtue of the dissipation process itself. Unless the motherboard has the ability to dynamically adjust these elements then one is faced with re-boots to change speeds.

Regards

That's not was h90 want! He want to "partly" shut down the comp for the time being the comp isn't in use, to save energy or whatever!

There several different ways how to do so!

Something very easy: the most of todays Multimedia Keyboards having the buttom to set the comp in "Sleep" mode. Even some Bios allow to set for "sleep" if the comp isn't use for some time, let say: 30 min or other and you need only to hit a key and the comp "wake up" again.

The comp goes to Standby for this time and reduces the Power consumption because the HDD stops, the CPU goes to "standby", VGA cuts and more.

So Michael, check your Bios if you can activate the Standby Mode or use a M-Keyboard. That's the easiest ways!

No I remember a long time there was a software, but I can't remember the name, which could switch off parts of the CPU, but as well I don't know with which CPUs it was compatible. As well dynamic change of the frequenz (my laptop has that for saving battery time).

Also it seems my new computer has something like that as Sandra (SiS Software) detect something 50-100 % adjustable speed on the CPU.

But I don't know how to set/monitor these things.

[autonomous_unit]

The somewhat long-standing clock control feature on Athlon64 parts has been called "powernow". You would need to install some AMD powernow driver in the OS that would change the clock rate based on system load.

Some of the newest parts (not sure if this is Athlon or just Opteron) apparently have some dynamic control of the power to parts of the chips to "turn them off" as you say. If this is anything like what Intel have been doing, this happens automatically in the hardware and requires no special software settings.

My experience with powernow has been spotty with Linux, but I am not sure if that would be the same under Windows. I read somewhere that AMD contributes the driver for Linux so you would think they can base it on the same code, but who knows... my experience is that after a while (several days at most), the driver would report that it could no longer control the CPU clock and you seem to get stuck with whatever clock speed it was using at the time. I think this could also have a lot to do with the quality of the motherboards, i.e. chipsets and BIOS. I was mostly using "budget" systems with the AMD CPUs, and never a laptop, so I cannot compare to my Intel experiences which were always IBM laptops or high-end workstation motherboards. Only my very latest socket AM2 X2 system seems to work consistently with powernow.

That said, I think suspending the system may win you a lot more power savings, as mentioned above. These days, the graphics cards seem to waste a lot of power too, and of course disk drives do not keep spinning for free, nor monitors shining brightly.

[Guest Reimar]

No I remember a long time there was a software.......

Toshiba has that kind of software for Auto Resume.

I don't think you want to downgrade the CPU for the whole time??! But if you use software to adjust on which way down or up, it's permanent for the working time (power on) of the comp and not just for the time you don't use the comp!

The power saving about consumption is very little at this way because the comp will run fully with just "downgraded" speed and finally you'll not save money and even not hardware. The CPU will run on nearly the same temp as with normal settings as long as the CPU fan isn't defect. If the CPU fan is slows down, the temp of the CPU goes up and that's may danger.

For my opinion the "sleep" or "standby" mode is the solution.

I use the standby mode on my comp with the FS-X and to come back to "normal" it need just ~10 sec.! And that comp is an AMD 64 Atlohn Dual 3800+ with MSI Diamond Board. I can resume to "normal" via KB, WiFi, LAN or Mouse.

[A_Traveller]

Despite the exclamation marks, it does seems the OP wants the ability to underclock.

H90... Michael? please tell me what motherboard you are using.

I also concur that use of hibernation and switching components off when not required is worthwhile, but I expect you knew that already.

Regards

[h90]

Despite the exclamation marks, it does seems the OP wants the ability to underclock.

H90... Michael? please tell me what motherboard you are using.

I also concur that use of hibernation and switching components off when not required is worthwhile, but I expect you knew that already.

Regards

Yeah H90=Michael....

I use ASRock AM2NF6G-VSTA on the AMD AMD X2 AM2 3600 (but I don't use the onboard graphiccard).

On the others I use a Gigabyte or Asus 7N400 or something like that, but can open it and check if thats important