A31p CPU upgrade but no performanc upgrade???

[ScottWitte]

Hi all.

Long time lurker / first time poster. With great advice I've gleaned here I've upgraded my A31p to 802.11g+ wireless (sweet!) and just upgraded my 1.7Ghz CPU to 2.5Ghz. It all went smoothly and there weren't even any leftover parts!

I was really looking forward to the 50% speed boost so I fired up Sandra 2007 and voilà! CPU benches sit right between the Pentium 4 M 1.6Ghz and 1.8Ghz reference values. So I'm thinking, "What the... I'm still stuck at 1.7Ghz???"

No. I didn't accidentally put the old CPU back in by mistake. Windows and Sandra report it as the 2.5Ghz CPU running at 2.5Ghz. CPU Utilization is 100% with the test running and maybe 5% without. As to your next question, No. I didn't run a comparison benchmark before replacing the CPU (dumb, I know) and No, I would rather not put the 1.7Ghz back in to get that comparison. But I assume Sandra's reference vlaues are averages from other laptops and I would still be really concerned that my A31p at 2.5Ghz performed no better than the average laptop at 1.7Ghz.

So, what's going on? Is it maybe something simple like a bios setting? I sure would appreciate some help.

[ARD]

Yes, it is a BIOS setting.
It is set to have the CPU speed throttle up on demand.
Set it it to always full speed.

[ScottWitte]

Yes, it is a BIOS setting.
It is set to have the CPU speed throttle up on demand.
Set it it to always full speed.

ARD,

I assume you are talking about the Speedstep setting. Is that right? I changed "Mode for AC" from Automatic to Maximum Perormance - Always high speed. Alas, that made no difference, which I guess makes sense. If the CPU throttles up on demand and Sandra puts 100% demand on it while testing, I would think that would throttle it up. And the test does say the CPU was running at 2.5Ghz.

Has anyone with an A3xx done a CPU benchmark with Sandra 2007? Or would someone be willing to give it a try? Doesn't matter the CPU speed and probably not so much the exact model so long as you are using Sandra 2007 for an apple to apple comparison. You can download from here:
http://www.sisoftware.net/index.html?di ... angx=en&a=

My results were:

Dhrystone ALU: 5615
Whetstone iSSE2: 4682

[Milos]

Has anyone with an A3xx done a CPU benchmark with Sandra 2007? Or would someone be willing to give it a try? Doesn't matter the CPU speed and probably not so much the exact model so long as you are using Sandra 2007 for an apple to apple comparison. You can download from here:
http://www.sisoftware.net/index.html?di ... angx=en&a=

My results were:

Dhrystone ALU: 5615
Whetstone iSSE2: 4682

ScottWitte, I don't have Sandra, but with PC Wizard 2006 (Version 1.691) my P4-m 1.8GHz CPU in an A31 (in my sig) gives:

• CPU: SL6FH 1.8GHz/512k
  Whetstone (FPU) : 1088 MFlops
  Whetstone (SSE2) : 2009 MFlops
  Dhrystone (ALU) : 4949 Mips

Do you have the latest BIOS and embedded controller update? Not sure if that would make a difference. BTW, see also these threads about hard drive speed increase (or not?) with Intel Application Accelerator (http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 4&start=30,http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=30902).

Milos

[ScottWitte]

CPU: SL6FH 1.8GHz/512k
Whetstone (FPU) : 1088 MFlops
Whetstone (SSE2) : 2009 MFlops
Dhrystone (ALU) : 4949 Mips

Milos,

Thanks. This suggests that I'm actually right about where I should be. I downloaded PC Wizard and got the following:

CPU: SL6P2 2.5GHz/512k
Whetstone (FPU) : 1488 MFlops
Whetstone (SSE2) : 2782 MFlops
Dhrystone (ALU) : 7160 Mips

Of course that left me more confused about the Sandra results so I dug deeper. Turns out the mobil CPUs in Sandra's database are all Pentium M with 1 or 2 MB L2 cache. What we have are Pentium 4-M with 512K L2. There seem to be no Pentium 4-M CPUs in Sandra's reference database.

For grins I did a comparison with my just built Core2 Duo desktop and find the CPU already runs 4 times faster than my now speedy A31p and I haven't even started to optimize much less overclock. When the Core2 Duo Thinkpads come out I will seriously consider upgrading. But at least the upgrade tips I've gotten here will make the wait less painful.

Thanks, Forum!

[smek]

Are you comparing a P4 2.5 to a P-M 1.8? If so than those benches would be about the same, and in some cases 1.8 might to better, especially if you ahve the older version of the p4. P-M is much closer to P3 effecient architecture instead of the more humble P4. It needs far less clocks to match the desktop CPU versions.