PC Processors

[slanted]

I have:
Windows 11, ASUS x570 board, 2 x 8GB RAM, AMD 5950X, AMD 6700XT GPU

Originally in 2021 I built this system, ran windows 10 and all went well. Fast system, dead quiet when idle. I recall being surprised that the CPU clock would reduce to an extremely low value when just sitting for example at the desktop. I then upgraded to Windows 11 but cant remember what the clocks were saying at that time back in 2021. I dont think that there appeared to be any issue. Then the PC was boxed up for shipping back to England as I Was moving back there. 

Anyway, a few weeks ago I have my computer back and I immediately turned it on and ran updates. I notice now the following: 

- cpu-z never shows multiplier below x36 (3.6ghz) and voltage never below 1.0v. It will go to 5.0ghz under some loads which seems normal. But I am almost certain that I've seen slow clocks and low voltage at idle here

- windows task manager barely shows low clock speed and never below 3.6ghz. Again I am sure I've seen something like 800mhz here but cannot recall whether it was only in windows 10 or both win10 and win11. 

- hwinfo shows the same clocks but the difference is "effective clock" can be as low as 50mhz on the individual cores. However, voltage never goes lower than 1.0v or 0.9v there. 

- AMD Ryzen master will show current clock speed at say 455mhz but current voltage is like 1.2v. It seems that ryzen master might be looking at the effective clock but the voltage seems too high. 

Yesterday I replaced the system board because I had some weird experiences which have now seemingly been resolved however the above issues still exist before and after system board being replaced. 

Prior to me replacing the system board (it was another ASUS x570 board) I had tried:
- updating bios and trying many bios versions
- resetting bios config (though I am always using default settings apart from enabling secure boot and TPM, though have also tried not changing any setting at all)
- reinstalling windows 11
- updating drivers and chipset drivers from AMD website
- starting in safe mode as well as disabling all services except microsoft services and rebooting

Nothing I tried made any difference EXCEPT when changing windows power plan config. I found if I set maximum processor state to 0% then cpu-z will show core speed of 1.7ghz which is also reflected in task manager, as well as the multiplier in cpu-z showing x17. 

Though if I have maximum processor state anywhere between 0% and 50% there is no change. But when I go to 55% then the clock speed and multiplier increase to x20. 

It seems to me like the cpu is not idling and I dont know if it's software or hardware related in my system. I have seen others posting cpu-z screenshots showing multiplier of x5.5 and 0.5v voltage, which I never see on my system. 

Can anyone offer any insight or suggestions why I am seeing this different experience here and how I can go about resolving it? Are there any other tests that I can do to confirm if hardware or software problem? 

[misterj]

slanted. So far I see no processor problem. Screenshots of Ryzen Master (RM) are very helpful to me, please post a few. I have never understood where Windows gets it CPU frequencies but they are usually wrong and cannot reflect individual cores. Ryzen uses the multiplier to adjust core frequencies. If you open CPU-Z, it will show the multiplier on the first tab and you can watch it vary as the load varies. You should uninstall hwinfo and any applications you got from the MB vendor. Get only the BIOS from them. Make sure all you AMD drivers are from here. I would like to see CPU-Z screenshots also. Thanks and enjoy, John.

PS: I just open RM

Just opened.

[slanted]

Hi misterj, 

Thank you for the info - this is reassuring I think. 

hwinfo I am running as a portable app (not installed). Same with all other tools, if there's a portable version then I'd prefer to use that for a number of reasons. 

In CPU-Z like you describe, I do see the multiplier and it never ever goes below x36 regardless of load. I set the screen to never turn off and it will be x36 at the lowest. It does ramp up to x50 when it's doing things like loading web pages for example. 

I'm attaching screenshots of cpu-z and ryzen master side by side with task manager. To try and get the lowest idle state of my machine, I closed a few programs from the system tray like discord, icue, steam and all other program windows. From task manager I manually set the corsair service to "efficiency" mode.

While waiting for the idle load to level out and relax a bit I now notice that the voltage in cpu-z is showing 0.38xv - which seems good. But the multiplier still only goes as low as x36. 

Does RM ever hang on you? I opened it while a game was running and after about a minute it began to lock up and the window stopped responding. I only needed to restart the PC to get it going again else it displayed a error "failed to initialize" when trying to open it.

[misterj]

Great, thanks, slanted. Interesting, I just open CPU-Z and it bottoms out at 36.0. In your RM SS one core is at 605 MHZ and the rest sleeping. The average core voltage is 0.33 Volts. All looks fine to me. Please do not run hwinfo while RM is running. Over the years I have some gliches with RM but none lately. It is the gold standard. Did you DL the latest version from here? Thanks and enjoy, John.

[slanted]

Thanks for reviewing and helping me. 

I can just ignore cpu-z then, perhaps it's incorrect. I don't think the CPU could run at 3.6ghz on all cores with only 0.3v..

After posting, I opened up icue again so as to set the lighting inside the case back to be dim instead of the annoying default rainbow illuminations and the CPU is back to constant 1.2v or there abouts. So I googled for a possible way to hard set the lighting to a new default. That was successful, so I don't even need to have any icue software installed any longer. As soon as the PC boots up it will run a very dim solid single colour and there's no need for any icue service on the system and now the CPU shows 0.3v quite often and I even saw every core sleep from RM software. 

I did try this with the old system board and this experience wasn't seen at all. The CPU voltage still remained high, even after fresh windows 11 install. However I didn't do the same test with the new system board. So perhaps this was also related to the system board as well as icue polling the sensors or something.. 

Thanks for your reply. I probably wouldn't have closed icue again as it previously didn't have any noticeable effect when I did. All I can hear now when the machine is idle is the slight purr of the h150 water pump and with the faint lighting you barely know there's a computer on in a dark room. Thanks again and have a great Sunday

PS yes I did get RM from there. Though on another note, I did install the chipset drivers from amd v5.x I did also go back and get the Asus chipset drivers v3.10 later on in the day from the vendors software download page. I don't know how to tell which are in use or if they're separate and unique. I've only got drivers and bios from Asus motherboard support site and no other fancy/weird software. It's usually a waste of (hardware) space. I needed to also grab Bluetooth, wifi and maybe audio drivers also as they didn't have and drivers from Microsoft (and of course none from amd).

[misterj · Accepted solution]

Thanks much, slanted. I am glad to help when I can. I have suggested in the past for users not to run icue and I think I ask you not to get anything but BIOS from the MB vendor. AMD drivers are often down level and I have seen some MB vendors insert some odd stuff in other vendor's applications (10 GBs NIC). I learned to try to never get anything but BIOS (a must) from them. I get all my drivers from the manufacturer and watch Windows when it wants to update drivers. You can do as you wish, our debug is over, so enjoy, John.