Laptop CPU Speed Issue

[KronoLeginaire]

Hey,

My friend recently bought an HP laptop new. It's SUPPOSE to have an AMD Athlon 64 3200 processor. But windows and everything running under windows reads the processor as being 997MHz. He tried to play a game that needed a minimum of 1.6GHz, but the game turned around and spit out a warning that the processor is only 1.6GHz.

I don't have the quickest of contact with him, it may take a day or a lil longer for him to respond to my advice but I'm thinking he needs to contact HP and return the laptop to them..

He can use a computer but I wouldn't trust him to go into the bios or anything like that to check any setts, so it's my stand he should contact HP and prolly have to send the laptop in.

Anyone concur or what?

[doctorgonzo]

I'm pretty sure those processors reduce their clock speed to save energy when they are idle. Thus, just because it shows that it is running at 1 GHz, that doesn't mean the wrong processor is installed. It just means the processor doesn't need to run fast at that point in time.

I'm not sure what to say about the game not running.

[KronoLeginaire]

Ok so I'll tell him to check his Power Options within his control panel and make sure it doesn't have the processor in a perpetual lower power mode?

[Jaggannath]

I'd honestly advise getting that checked, or at least contacting HP to ask about this, as I don't think that's right. My laptop doesn't use all the cycles when power saving, but when running it does

[KronoLeginaire]

Yeah thats basically what I just told him too.

[glc]

What is the actual speed of that 3200 supposed to be? That's just a speed equivalent rating. A desktop Athlon XP 3200+ is what - 2.0 or 2.2 GHz? I don't know what the mobiles are.

[KronoLeginaire]

Well it's certaintly NOT 1Ghz. I mean thats crazy talk son!

[piasabird]

There may be some setting that forces the laptop to run at the max speed without slowing down. It is a good bet that he should call for service. It may be some known issue, that may cause the bios to regress back to the safest setting or default. I have seen motherboards that occassionally can not recognize their CPU and you have to change a setting or two.

Something like a power surge or a brown out could cause problems.

[Panama Red]

Here's a thought. Have him download Folding@Home or Prime95. Both will put a full load test on the processor. Once the program of choice is loaded and running, check the Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) and make sure the cpu is at 100%. THEN check the cpu speed in System Properties and see what it shows. If his cpu is under the rated speed, you need to make a call to HP.

[doctorgonzo]

Or if you don't want to install those applications, you can download CPU Burn-in, which is a standalone EXE that doesn't require any installation.