Laptop CPU not running at clock speed

seriousgamer

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Sep 26, 2012
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Hi guys

my brother has an HP laptop with an i5 2450m and hd 7670m

I installed CPU-Z and it shows the cpu running at 700mhz-800mhz

It has been formatted (the laptop) many times, nothing on it, he just uses it for MS office, schooll,

Shouldnt it run at 2500mhz?
 

seriousgamer

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Sep 26, 2012
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Yes we're looking at core speed

I was a little worried because my desktop Athlon X64 performs much better than the I5 2450m which keeps lagging and opening up programs really slow (laptop also has 6gb ram)
 

ryudeshi

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Feb 13, 2013
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run something that stresses the CPU like Prime95 or Orthos then check. If you aren't using any processing power speedstep will kick in and throttle the CPU speed to save power.

Also, just a note, but some computers (like the ThinkPad series) throttle the CPU if the battery is not in the computer. I am not sure the reason but my ThinkPad x230 does this... it won't go over 1800Mhz without the battery.
 

tigerg

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Feb 24, 2013
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Go read up on speed stepping like I said.

Your computer is fine. If you put it under heavy load, expecially on battery with the performance windows profile, you will see the multiplier jump up to the 20s.

Let me guess, your multiplier is at 8 when it shows 800mhz, right?
 

tigerg

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Feb 24, 2013
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Yeah, but you have no clue what his system is in either case. You don't know what kind of drive it is pulling from. You don't know how many processes are on the laptop. You don't know how cluttered the registry is. There can be a ton of reasons why he feels the i5 is slower.

I'm talking about the operating speed of his processor. Nothing else.

He sees his core speed at 800 because his multiplier is slowing down to 8 as it SHOULD be. Under load, and with the proper configuration, the multiplier will speed up, and therefore so will his core speed. I doubt very much it is broken.

If seriousgamer wants to run at max frequency, he might be able to disable the speed stepping or other power savings features in the BIOS. Have a look.
 

rdc85

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Apr 29, 2012
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the OP compare desktop vs laptop..........

that cannot be compared, lappy will somewhat underperformed if u compare with desktop...

anyway as tigerg said try read about speedstep (it will give much info), if comp/laptop is idle the processor speed supposed to slow/go down...

I think the problems lies in 5400 rpm drives (HDD), in my laptop the HDD is the biggest botleneck.....
 

k1114

Distinguished
He said he reformatted so that gives me an idea. I will assume 5400rpm but if you own a laptop you know it doesn't lag like he is saying. Yes it is noticeably slower than 7200rpm but I doubt he hasn't used a laptop before. If oem bloatware is the issue then we can help him with that. We look for solutions not "what is not the issue." Speedstep does not affect performance so we find out what is.
 

rdc85

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Apr 29, 2012
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Well, I sometimes work with my lappy and desktop side by side..
i know it not fair to compete my desktop with SSD and my lappy with 5400 rpm disk, but it give me somewhat feeling it slow as hell..

From my experiment, I try to keep a good eyes on resource manager, sometimes the cpu, gpu and mem still not even reach 50% but the HDD I/O utilization is at 100% causing laging..

my conclusion my HDD is the bigest bottle neck, and I read somewhere that Seagate and Western Digital admit that 5400 rpm is a flop (marketing gimmick only). they do an internal test, that with 7200 rpm disk will finish the job much quicker than 5400 rpm ones, in overal the power consumtion both drive will same for that job. so green drives is just a gimmick..

anyways, back to OP, any updates?