CPU throttling, Blasphemy!

[Thread_Necro]

I was researching for an article I had to write about todays computer power consumption when i stumbled across the deffinition for CPU Throttling. Now ive built many systems before but I've never heard anything about cpu throttling or what it does, I've seen it in the bios, I really thought it was just the speed at which the motherboard brought the cpu back up to frequency if there were power saving modes enabled.

Turns out, CPU Throttling is actually stunting a processor and preventing it from working to its full potential, because it limits the amount of time a cpu can be at 100% per second.

Now waht I'd like to know is, I got me an old athlon xp, its dying already so if it overheats, whatever. Do you think lowering the cpu throttle threshhold will increase performance at...

1) desktop level
2) video encoding level
3) game playing level
4) browsing the net level

[Ultima]

well,

actually, cpu throttling is more like turning the speed down on a cpu to keep it from overheating, which the P4 prescotts were known for.

Especially the 3.6 and 3.8Ghz ones, they became so hot that the thermal protection kicked in and throttled the cpu speed down to a grade where it would stay within thermal range of safety.

And I think yer confused with cool & quiet, which is available for Athlon64's and that makes them run at a certain speed, dependant on the load base at that moment. if it is turned on, and yer letting it stand on the desktop idling, it will kick in and throttle down to say 800Mhz and a lot lower voltage, to consume less power.

If ya wanna know more, let us know.

PS if ya wanna optimize it for gaming and all the other things ya mentioned, just don't turn it on.

[Thread_Necro]

Well would disabling the cou throttle increase performance in apps that run 100% cpu usage?

[RamonGTP]

Disabling throttling will only increase performance if the processor is throttling down to begin with.

[Thread_Necro]

well if the cpu has 50% throttling threshhold, wouldnt that mean 50% of the time spent at 100% is actually performing calculations?

:EDIT:
I decided to run my own test:

I first went into Everquest2 and sat at the loading screen measuring FPS
the fps was a constant 34 with occasional drop to 33. This is with 50% cpu throttling on.

I then reboot my system, and disabled CPU throttling

I opened Everquest 2 again and measured FPS, wow, its not a constant 38 with No fluctuation.



could my data be erroneous? perhapse, there could have been a program running that was sucking cpu, the refresh of the reboot could have affected it. I did notice that things seemed to hang a tad more while booting windows, but so far the game is performing a little better than it did.

I could say that overall performance is affected but dedicated applications are improved upon. Who knows. It would be awesome if a place like Tomshardware or xbit labs did an article on this cpu throttling.