[conspire] New Box

[Philip Martin]

the 100mhzsteps is talking about the 'step' size that your CPU can
take for power management purposes.

i.e. if your CPU is 2.6 GHz (which, if memory serves, the 5200+ is)
your CPU could, in theory take 100 MHz steps down (2.6, 2.5, 2.4, etc,
all the way down to 1 GHz) to balance performance and power
consumption.

If you'd like to make sure your processors scale up well with load you
can execute something like:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null

in a terminal window and cat /proc/cpuinfo in another and watch the
'cpu MHz' line (or: watch -n1 'grep "cpu MHz" /proc/cpuinfo'  (Ctrl-C
to quit)) and make sure it goes from 1000 up to something around
2600ish.

-Philip

On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 9:47 PM, David Fox <dfox94085 at gmail.com> wrote:
> First, a big thank you to Daniel for technical help and to Kai for
> moral support!
>
> Daniel especially. This ECS box has been running smoothly since early
> Sunday morning. I had to go to Fry's after all for a sata power cable
> and we managed to get the DVD burner (Pioneer) installed and running
> as well as my old 40 gig storage drive with the avis and mp3s. Now I
> can watch those high-def battlestar galactica episodes in mplayer
> without the audio stuttering. Too slow on an athlon thunderbird.
>
> To Daniel since I don't remember your email address off the top of my head:
>
> My /proc/cpuinfo seems a bit low for a 5200 speed processor. I know
> that a 5200 isn't really 5200 mhz, that's a marketing gimmick. But
> couldn't it be higher, with better bios settings and/or overclocking?
> Now I don't want to even try overclocking this cpu until I put in a
> better power supply (although the system is stable for now -- I hope).
>
> Given what I have, and the bios settings you did last nightl, is there
> "throttling" going on here? I see something in /proc/cpuinfo called
> 100mhzsteps under "power management"
>
> Here is my /proc/cpuinfo:
>
> dfox at newbox:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
> processor       : 0
> vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
> cpu family      : 15
> model           : 107
> model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+
> stepping        : 2
> cpu MHz         : 1000.000
> cache size      : 512 KB
> physical id     : 0
> siblings        : 2
> core id         : 0
> cpu cores       : 2
> fpu             : yes
> fpu_exception   : yes
> cpuid level     : 1
> wp              : yes
> flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge
> mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext
> fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow rep_good pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy
> svm extapic cr8_legacy 3dnowprefetch
> bogomips        : 2011.12
> TLB size        : 1024 4K pages
> clflush size    : 64
> cache_alignment : 64
> address sizes   : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
> power management: ts fid vid ttp tm stc 100mhzsteps
>
> processor       : 1
> vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
> cpu family      : 15
> model           : 107
> model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+
> stepping        : 2
> cpu MHz         : 1000.000
> cache size      : 512 KB
> physical id     : 0
> siblings        : 2
> core id         : 1
> cpu cores       : 2
> fpu             : yes
> fpu_exception   : yes
> cpuid level     : 1
> wp              : yes
> flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge
> mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext
> fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow rep_good pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy
> svm extapic cr8_legacy 3dnowprefetch
> bogomips        : 2011.12
> TLB size        : 1024 4K pages
> clflush size    : 64
> cache_alignment : 64
> address sizes   : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
> power management: ts fid vid ttp tm stc 100mhzsteps
>
> Another thing. I got nvidia 3d graphics running in Ubuntu Hardy easily
> enough. Things in that arena generally work OK, but I'm noticing some
> strange video effects when i do 3d stuff - like parts of the screen
> going blank when the mouse pointer moves across the screen. i don't
> think it's endemic to Hardy and their current nvidia driver because
> I've seen the same things happen in Sabayon when I boot 3.5 beta 3 (oh
> and Bruce: I got a good clean verified Sabayon 64 DVD now!) so things
> like their network manager applet are unusable because i can't see
> half of the applet.
>
> I'm going to have to read up on that more over the next few days. I
> think the 6100 Geforce that's on the MB should be good enough for now.
>
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