Core 2 Duo (Mobile) & SpeedStepping

Okay, I sure thought I understood speed stepping- and it's ability to adjust freq to provide for longer battery life - but ...


I recently purchased a Dell XPS M1710- with a T7200 2.0Ghz-

I noticed that it's performance was a bit lacking- so I began to dig and find that the processor stepping constantly- dropping as low as 400Mhz at one point...

But it rarely runs at the 2.0Ghz that it is capable of.

Dell Diagnostics show no hardware problems, but I'm just not convinced that something isn't quite right...


So, my question is this... is this normal? I'm not talking about any kind of load either, freshly booted only driver related software running- and I'm stepped back to 997Mhz - oh, and I'm using AC power - I rarely use battery.

400Mhz? i don't think a C2D can operate at 400Mhz, the lowest clock is around half the Max, so probably 1Ghz or around there, for just about everything it should stay at 1.2-1.6Ghz, and they hit the max of 2Ghz when you max out the CPU, so try running super pi and see if that bumps it up

also, how are you checking the CPU speed? use CPUZ to check it

We have noticed that Windows does not always properly recognise the speed when Speedstepping is enabled. For example we have a notebook that runs at 1.6GHz but Windows sees it as a 900MHz CPU.