New Centrino Software to reduce fan noise and heat

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feejeean · #31 Post by **feejeean** » Tue May 24, 2005 9:09 pm

hmmm ... I set my voltages to the following but don't seem to have got any major benefit from CHC ... any pointers ? ...

6x - 0.764V
8x - 0.812V
10x - 0.908V
12x - 1.020V
14x - 1.100V
17x - 1.292V

The IBM Maximiser Wizard is showing 4:37 (Battery 94%)
the Windows battery icon is showing 4:14 (Battery 94%)
(Why is there a difference?) - and how do I get rid of the Windows battery icon when in battery mode?

EDIT: Sorry for not being clear ... the CPU temp has definitely dropped to like 50 -55 C.

Kenn · #32 Post by **Kenn** » Tue May 24, 2005 10:41 pm

You should see some benefits from 6x speed, especially if you run at lowest speed setting while on battery. Going from 1.340 to 1.292 might not net you much more battery life if you run full speed.

I just finished 8 hours of prime95 testing on the 3VU - At 1.7GHz, it runs without crashing at 0.988V, and survived 8 hours of Prime95 without error at 1.036V. That CPU is an undervolting monster!

I tried undervolting my 1.8GHz at 1700Mhz, and could only get it stable at 1.086v or so.

Scorpiontico · #33 Post by **Scorpiontico** » Tue May 24, 2005 11:39 pm

could somebody write a guide for cpu voltage and speed settings for a t43/sonoma?

or just post your best minumun settings you got with the program.

thanks.

dvorak · #34 Post by **dvorak** » Wed May 25, 2005 7:47 am

Kenn wrote:You should see some benefits from 6x speed, especially if you run at lowest speed setting while on battery. Going from 1.340 to 1.292 might not net you much more battery life if you run full speed.

I just finished 8 hours of prime95 testing on the 3VU - At 1.7GHz, it runs without crashing at 0.988V, and survived 8 hours of Prime95 without error at 1.036V. That CPU is an undervolting monster!

I tried undervolting my 1.8GHz at 1700Mhz, and could only get it stable at 1.086v or so.

Did you try the CHC's own test too? I accidentally put it near 1.0v too, then got a blue-screen immediately. I didn't bear to put it too low either, wouldn't want all my data to be corrupted because of a singe bit error while packing, or where-ever :)
6x@716v and 18x@1.116v currently quite stable on mine.

Kenn · #35 Post by **Kenn** » Wed May 25, 2005 8:49 am

I run CHC's 30-second self-test whenever I try out a new voltage, but I found it is NOT reliable in terms of testing system stability. This is because it's not very sensitive - i.e. it does not check your results against an answer key. So while it will help you detect if your voltage is so low that the system crashes at load (and it's good to run because if it does crash, when you reboot CHC will automatically revert to the last good voltage setting), it won't tell you if you're getting any of those creeping single-bit errors that may give you headaches weeks or months after you think you're safe. That's where Prime95 comes in.

Also, I was running my 1.8 at 1.086v for a while - it would error out of Prime95 within a minute but would never bsod. I was paying attention for any kind of weird behavior, and for some reason large downloads would randomly seize up near the end of transfer. Granted there could be any number of reasons for this, but it gave me an excuse to bump up the voltage to 1.132, which I know is rock-solid.

Scorpiontico · #36 Post by **Scorpiontico** » Wed May 25, 2005 12:08 pm

anybody...

3 more questions,
do you really recommend this program for t43s (2.0ghz sonoma)?

what other program do you use?

which is the best avalaible program right now besides this one (or that beats this one)

thanks.

dvorak · #37 Post by **dvorak** » Wed May 25, 2005 12:21 pm

I suppose RMClock works with Sonoma, well it can't hurt to try, all is software based, the worse that can happen is a crash, simply reboot to recover :)

I haven't had time to get CHC to work with standby, perhaps it's a bit of the maker's fault, but I'm not missing out on anything either in my opinion, only saving CPU cycles, hence I haven't tried anything 'better' than RMClock.

Kenn · #38 Post by **Kenn** » Wed May 25, 2005 11:47 pm

From my short experience with RMClock, it seems like the two programs are more or less equivalent in functionality. The only thing you're missing out on is the purdy XP-like UI

Kenn · #39 Post by **Kenn** » Wed May 25, 2005 11:49 pm

Scorpiontico wrote:anybody...

3 more questions,
do you really recommend this program for t43s (2.0ghz sonoma)?

what other program do you use?

which is the best avalaible program right now besides this one (or that beats this one)

thanks.

Since Sonoma draws more power than previous versions of Centrino, I'd definitely give either Centrino Hardware Control or RMClock a try - you could get some precious battery minutes back. These two applications do the same thing, and seem to be equivalent, so hopefully that answers your last two questions!

dvorak · #40 Post by **dvorak** » Thu May 26, 2005 2:06 am

Kenn wrote:From my short experience with RMClock, it seems like the two programs are more or less equivalent in functionality. The only thing you're missing out on is the purdy XP-like UI 8)

CHC has SMART HDD monitoring too, and ATI over/underclocking "options".
I use another program to sometimes check the SMART status of the harddrive, so I'm not fond of wasting more resources, and the ATI under/overclocking is no use for me either, the latter produced very visible artifacts when trying out a 3d game. (FYI the underclocking is a fixed value, same as Powerplay's)

JHaislet · #41 Post by **JHaislet** » Thu May 26, 2005 2:31 am

Does the ATI underclock feature also work on the FireGL V3200 series cards (as found in the T43p)?

dvorak · #42 Post by **dvorak** » Thu May 26, 2005 2:45 am

JHaislet wrote:Does the ATI underclock feature also work on the FireGL V3200 series cards (as found in the T43p)?

You could try, but I find it useless anyways, I doubt it'll give you more than 1 degree of temp change while on AC, as I'm currently at 38 degrees and the fan still runs with no ATI underclocking (600MHz CPU).

Kenn · #43 Post by **Kenn** » Thu May 26, 2005 9:45 am

dvorak wrote: (FYI the underclocking is a fixed value, same as Powerplay's)

Did you use an external method to detect this? From CHC, you can choose 5MHz increments down to 45MHz for the ATI core and memory, and it does seem to "take". Or are you talking about the auto-clockdown, which you can't seem to tweak?

dvorak · #44 Post by **dvorak** » Thu May 26, 2005 2:20 pm

Kenn wrote:
dvorak wrote: (FYI the underclocking is a fixed value, same as Powerplay's)
Did you use an external method to detect this? From CHC, you can choose 5MHz increments down to 45MHz for the ATI core and memory, and it does seem to "take". Or are you talking about the auto-clockdown, which you can't seem to tweak?

Okay, I must apologise here, I didn't remember you could change the values manually :)
None the less there's a word "minimum" next to 105MHz, which is close to the Powerplay values, hence my statement.
Now that I noticed, it appeared I could change them on DC only when Powerplay was disabled, logical, but I've got some important work open, and cannot start testing how the card reacts to the lower settings (below 105).

Regarding the power usage drops, going from ~12w to ~10w took more or less the same time with both programs, as was to be expected.

GoEatFood · #45 Post by **GoEatFood** » Thu May 26, 2005 2:48 pm

the temps. you guys are running at seem so high...I've had my laptop on all night to now and it's only at 43c...running 600mhz and running at normal voltage it's at about 48.

Kenn · #46 Post by **Kenn** » Fri May 27, 2005 8:44 am

GoEatFood wrote:the temps. you guys are running at seem so high...I've had my laptop on all night to now and it's only at 43c...running 600mhz and running at normal voltage it's at about 48.

Is this at load?

I just moved from a place where it's 40F at 8AM in the mornings to where it's over 70. My CPU temps have accordingly started to vary dramatically:

Before, idle at 600Mhz 0.700V was 33-34C. Now it's about 39-41C. Idle at 1.8Ghz used to be 37-39C, now it's about 43-44C. At load it goes to 55-56C but thankfully no higher, whereas in cooler climes it never went over 50-51.

dvorak · #47 Post by **dvorak** » Fri May 27, 2005 9:53 am

Could you, Kenn, or anyone else list their other "status" programs (such as Mobile Meter etc) running while CHC is. I'm trying to figure out why does it prevent my standby until I reboot, I can suspend the machine in the first ~30 seconds after I started CHC, but after that it's no luck till reboot.

How did you set the HDD options? Perhaps there's a problem regarding the HDD spin-off/standby, although I did try setting them to various settings and restarting, no luck.

Kenn · #48 Post by **Kenn** » Sat May 28, 2005 12:37 pm

To make it easier, here is a current snap of my process list.
http://www.pbase.com/image/43974160

I've tried all of the acoustical management and power saving features for the HD, and none seem to interfere with standby. Also, I have my laptop set to standby on lid-close, so I actually use standby in a number of different situations with a number of different processes running, never had a problem.

Regarding monitoring, I rarely have mobilemeter running unless I want to see voltage usage/charge or map changes over time with the graphs. I do run coolmon on the desktop though.

dvorak · #49 Post by **dvorak** » Sun May 29, 2005 4:51 am

Kenn, I noticed you're also using Firefox as your main browser.
When resuming standby, does the wait time linearly increase with time been suspended when Firefox has a webpage with flash objects opened?
I'm trying to figure out what causes such weird glitches on my Thinkpad (CHC prob, standby+hib lag), I presume your suspending works fine with flash opened?
That problem seems to be related to Firefox only, IE works fine with let's say 4 www.theinquirer.net pages opened (each has about 3 flash ads) while Fx produces a minute of waiting.

Kenn · #50 Post by **Kenn** » Sun May 29, 2005 12:18 pm

dvorak wrote:Kenn, I noticed you're also using Firefox as your main browser.
When resuming standby, does the wait time linearly increase with time been suspended when Firefox has a webpage with flash objects opened?
I'm trying to figure out what causes such weird glitches on my Thinkpad (CHC prob, standby+hib lag), I presume your suspending works fine with flash opened?
That problem seems to be related to Firefox only, IE works fine with let's say 4 www.theinquirer.net pages opened (each has about 3 flash ads) while Fx produces a minute of waiting.

Interesting find, I'll give that a shot today and test it out, although I don't remember the computer ever taking more than 3 seconds to come out of standby (time for LCD to activate and display password prompt).

Btw, I'm running one of the daily trunk builds of Firefox 1.0+ (May 18 I believe), which has made some significant changes to the browser's rendering order, so I don't know if it will be different over 1.04.

JHaislet · #51 Post by **JHaislet** » Sun May 29, 2005 2:14 pm

Regarding Firefox, it might be related to how much stuff it keeps in ram. From my observations, IE swaps most stuff to disk & keeps very little info in ram. Firefox.exe on the other hand, I've seen grow up to almost 150MB of ram usage with just an hour or two of normal web browsing. Additionally, if one never closes Firefox, it tends to occupy a rather large chunk of ram.

For example, I've got about 7 tabs open now, and Firefox.exe is using about 80MB of ram. Writing ~80MB of what I would assume to be rather small files to the HDD when suspending could take a significant amount of time.

dvorak · #52 Post by **dvorak** » Mon May 30, 2005 2:33 am

JHaislet wrote:Regarding Firefox, it might be related to how much stuff it keeps in ram. From my observations, IE swaps most stuff to disk & keeps very little info in ram. Firefox.exe on the other hand, I've seen grow up to almost 150MB of ram usage with just an hour or two of normal web browsing. Additionally, if one never closes Firefox, it tends to occupy a rather large chunk of ram.

I think that can't affect resuming standby, adding an additional 12 small flash ads to RAM definitely shouldn't be extending resuming time by a minute. That happened on the Guest account too, so it can't be caused by extensions. I'll see how Kenn's 'test' goes, perhaps I'll change to newer ones or try one of those "tweaked" builds (http://www.moox.ws/), although I am a bit paranoid trying builds not compiled by Mozilla team or myself :P

My resuming is not always in 3 seconds (hibernation also), takes a few extra moments probably because I'm running Apache, MySQL, 5*Firefox, Zend Development Suite with Thunderbird and so on.

Kenn · #53 Post by **Kenn** » Mon May 30, 2005 12:06 pm

I had my system on standby for nearly 24 hours after loading a short flash movie in Firefox. Standby took about 1-2 minutes to come out of - the system fan/electronics started humming, but the standby indicator (crescent moon) stayed on and the LCD didn't turn on for a minute or more.

Interesting, but it did eventually recover from standby just fine.

dvorak · #54 Post by **dvorak** » Mon May 30, 2005 12:55 pm

Kenn wrote:I had my system on standby for nearly 24 hours after loading a short flash movie in Firefox. Standby took about 1-2 minutes to come out of - the system fan/electronics started humming, but the standby indicator (crescent moon) stayed on and the LCD didn't turn on for a minute or more.

Interesting, but it did eventually recover from standby just fine.

Thanks for your test.
Seems I'm not totally alone with this glitch, interesting that you haven't experienced it before, modest browsing perhaps :)
I at first thought it was related to Windows' services and spent ages trying and testing them while the answer was in front of me the whole time.

Flashblock extension (http://flashblock.mozdev.org/) should help if you run into a nasty flash ad that wants to cripple your standby.

A bugreport to devs probably takes months before anyone looks at it, shall I give it a try? :P

Kenn · #55 Post by **Kenn** » Mon May 30, 2005 1:12 pm

Yeah, for all intents and purposes my browsing is pretty light, and I'm a bit stubborn in that I sometimes close unnecessary rich media content before I standby/hibernate.

I haven't checkthe the mozilla bugtraq for a while now, but but if it hasn't been addressed on a mid-may trunk build, chances are it might be a while until we get a fixed release. Probably a good idea to send a report in just to stoke the fires a bit

skanky · #56 Post by **skanky** » Wed Jun 08, 2005 2:33 pm

is it me or does checking "show cpu speed icon" just display a flag instead of the speed!?

i've tried it on a dell d610 at works correctly but not on my T42!

any suggestions?

sugo · #57 Post by **sugo** » Wed Jun 08, 2005 5:52 pm

skanky wrote:is it me or does checking "show cpu speed icon" just display a flag instead of the speed!?

Try checking the box "Show CPU Temperature icon in the Taskbar" instead.

#58 Post by **K. Eng** » Wed Jun 08, 2005 6:24 pm

I see that this program is getting some press

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23803

skanky · #59 Post by **skanky** » Thu Jun 09, 2005 8:39 am

sugo wrote:
skanky wrote:is it me or does checking "show cpu speed icon" just display a flag instead of the speed!?
Try checking the box "Show CPU Temperature icon in the Taskbar" instead.

lol.
/me slaps forehead!

doppler · #60 Post by **doppler** » Mon Jun 13, 2005 3:17 pm

dvorak wrote:CHC 1.7 interferes standby, cold-boot, standby works nicely, after I start CHC, wait a minute or so and try to standby: "System Standby Failed", device driver for the MS ACPI ... is preventing the machine from entering standby.

I'll try CHC 1.8 beta 01, perhaps it fixes this.

I'm running CHC 1.82 and am experiencing the exact same problem. Not sure how to debug it, but it is certainly annoying, but I really like what CHC brings to the machine. Just wanted to add another data point to the issue. Perhaps we should contact the author. Oh, I'm using a T42 1.8, I upgraded the BIOS and all the drivers to try to get away from this problem, no joy.

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