Overclocked, no idle

H

ho72

Weaksauce
Joined
Sep 20, 2005
Messages
119
New 3770K owner here. I've settled in to a decent, stable 4.4GHz overclock @ 1.216 volts on an Asus P8 Z77V Pro. The curious thing is that I seem to have lost idle capability, i.e., the processor speed remains at 4.4 at both idle and full load; voltage is constant as well.

All I changed in the BIOS was the Turbo multiplier, voltage offset, LLC, disabled spread spectrum, etc. (usual stuff), and I specifically did not touch any settings in CPU Power Management that I deemed to be involved with lower power idle states (Speedstep, c-states, etc.). But, to be honest, today's BIOSes have so many settings and features that it's easy overlook something -- especially for someone like me, whose last overclock was a Celeron 300A. :eek:

Just curious if anyone has a suggestion about where I may have gone astray here.

Thanks.

PS: Note that my sig contains the system I'm upgrading from. It's been 7 good years... :D
 
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Some power settings might have automatically been changed for you when you touched the OC settings. Just double back into the power management tab and check to make sure the power saving features are indeed enabled.
(Unless you've already done that and it's still not working... in which case i'm being dumb :) )
 
OK, I loaded the optimized defaults (F5) and my idle state returned. RAM timings were wrong so I went back into the BIOS and made only one change -- loaded the XMP profile. Idle state went away.

Bleh. Maybe I can just set the timing manually and keep my idle state... not sure I can overclock and idle at the same time though. Anyone here doing it?
 
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I can. All C states and EIST enabled, XMP profile active on the RAM. LLC is set to either high or ultra high. I'm using a negative voltage offset - 1.376v @4.8ghz, where I typically run, 0.976v @ 1.6ghz.
 
Well this turns out to be operator error -- no surprise there.

One of the first things I did when configuring Win7 (before I ever messed with the BIOS) was to choose the High Performance power config which apparently does not allow any OS de-clocking of the processor. I thought I was seeing idle states before when the multiplier dropped a bit to 36-37, but now it's sitting happily at 16, drawing less than 1v at temps that I might expect to find in my refrigerator.

Sorry to be such a moron. :p
 
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ho72 said:
Well this turns out to be operator error -- no surprise there.

One of the first things I did when configuring Win7 (before I ever messed with the BIOS) was to choose the High Performance power config which apparently does not allow any OS de-clocking of the processor. I thought I was seeing idle states before when the multiplier dropped a bit to 36-37, but now it's sitting happily at 16, drawing less than 1v at temps that I might expect to find in my refrigerator.

Sorry to be such a moron. :p
Click to expand...

Don't feel dumb. In the early days of Cool 'n Quiet you not only had to install drivers to make it work, but you had to configure power saving modes in XP. Now it's all done automatically for you, so it's easy to tweak without thinking :D
 
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