Is disabling SpeedStep really necessary?

bremen1874

bremen1874

bremen1874

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I'm currently running my Q6600 at 3.0GHz on a P5Q-E using the retail cooler. For this very minor overclock I left all of the energy saving BIOS options such as SpeedStep enabled and just manually set the CPU and memory voltages.

Sometime soon (once I've replaced the cooler) I'm planning on pushing things a bit further.

I was wondering why many people seem to recommend disabling the energy saving features as a first step? I can see that it'd be necessary if you want to force a lower than default multiplier, but is there another good reason that I'm missing?

Any insight would be appreciated?

P.S. WTF is this 'Claimed' malarkey I keep coming across? I can only assume that it's something that only people that don't remember the invention of the audio CD can relate to!
 
As to your speedstep question i think its if you want a consistent overclock and to your "claimed" thing i think theres just some sad people around :p
 
It can make overclocks unstable when the CPU is idle. For instance, I'll assume that your Q6600 is at 333x9. Normally it would have idled at 1.6Ghz with SS enabled. Now it idles at 333x6 = 2Ghz. The potential problem is that SS lowers the CPU voltage and the SS voltage doesn't change when you overvolt the chip. The CPU might not be stable at 2Ghz with the lower volts and thus your system could crash at idle even if it was stable under load.

It's only really a problem with big FSB overclocks. For example, say you got to 3Ghz with 429x7. That CPU would idle at 2574Mhz (429x6) with the voltage intended for 1600Mhz, which is probably not going to be stable.
 
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As mattus says, it depends a lot on how your vcore fluctuates with speed and load as to whether you can get it stable at both speeds. The more voltage you need to pump into it for the full speed overclock, the more likely you are to have issues at the lower speed I think.

Luckily my E8400 does 4Ghz (445x9) at only 1.29v as so I'm able to leave speedstep enabled and have never had a single problem.
 
Got Speedstep on my E8400 with no problems :) Keep the temps down a bit when not doing much in Windows.
 
EIST just lowers the multi of my systems so when the PC is idle the MHz drops down along with the power draw from the wall socket.

Disabling EIST (Enhanced INTEL SpeedStep) isn't necessary unless it's causing you a problem. If you run into stability issues when your system is overclocked then try disabling it for trouble-shooting purposes.

Apart from that I see no sense in an idle computer sitting there running at 4GHz! :D
 
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