Athlon 64

[goyta]

I have a 4-year-old PC with a good old single-core AMD Athlon 64 3800+ "Venice". Unfortunately, I had the bad luck of getting a processor unit that tends to overheat, and living in a subtropical area without climatisation doesn't help much. I used to be a BOINC user too, but I had to give up in part because of overheating (the other reason couldn't be solved: BOINC steals idle time from Diskeeper and doesn't let it do its background defragging).

So, a CPU temperature monitor *with* throttling capabilities is essential for me, if I don't want to run the risk of having the CPU melt. I had been using NextSensor successfully for a couple of years on Windows XP and on 32-bit Windows 7 Release Candidate, but now I've switched to 64-bit final Windows 7, and NextSensor doesn't have a 64-bit version.

TThrottle 1.70 appears to be showing a differential temperature to a baseline which I don't know what is. Under low activity, the displayed temperature is in the 5-10°C range; under higher activity, 15-25°C. The latter temperature range is the current room temperature here (São Paulo, Brazil), and the processor is obviously much hotter. NextSensor used to show it in the 40s Celsius under low activity, up to 55°C on a hot day (25-30°C room temperature), and in the 60s when doing something heavier. NextSensor used to be configured to throttle down the CPU when temperature reached 68°C, since the safe limit for my processor is either 70 or 71°C (according to different sources), and it often reached that temperature when testing RAR archives, converting videos, encrypting files, performing antivirus scans, etc.

I saw the remark that TThrottle showed a differential temperature with AMD K10 CPUs, but mine is a K8... I also saw that compatible AMD CPUs have to be of the "0F" family; CPU-Z shows the family of mine to be "F" (without a leading zero, but I suppose it's the same hex value of 15). So, I thought it would be compatible. Is there any known problem with Athlon 64s?

I saw the post about the NVIDIA drivers for Windows 7 as well. Both my motherboard's chipset (nForce 410) and my graphics card (8500 GT) are NVIDIA. I edited the registry to suppress the indicated values, rebooted, but nothing changed.

AMD Cool'n'Quiet is enabled in the BIOS, and CPU-Z shows Windows 7's AMD drivers to be remarkably effective in keeping the processor efficiently throttled down when possible. As for the GPU, TThrottle shows the temperature at a constant 94°C, which sounds too high, but the card doesn't feel so hot and it even has only passive cooling.

I am still inclined to use TThrottle because I couldn't find any other 64-bit temperature monitor with throttling capabilities. But if it's a differential temperature, I'd have to know what the baseline is, so I can set a proper temperature limit. Any idea how I can check this, or even better, make TThrottle show the real absolute temperature?

Thank you very much for your help.

[fred]

Find the right family in the TThrottle log. (tab 7)

The F family can be adjusted by placing the tthrottle.xml from examples to the tthrottle.exe folder.
Look for:
<PROCESSOR>
  <amdFactor>49</amdFactor>
</PROCESSOR>

Remove the comment and comment text <!-- -->
If you want 20C up change the value to 29.

If the GPU reports the temperature it may be correct or a driver problem but 90C is the value some cares have.
Win 7 still has some driver problems.

[goyta]

Thanks a lot for the tip. With it, I was able to identify my precise processor family (Family: Fh, Model: 2F, Stepping: 2) and perform some experiments here.

Fortunately, I still have XP in dual-boot with Windows 7 here in the same computer. So, I installed 32-bit TThrottler on XP and compared it with NextSensor's readings. Initially, I noticed there was a difference of about 35 degrees between them. So, I changed the "AMD Factor" from 49 to 14. TThrottler came close, but still 1-3 degrees below NextSensor's readings, in a non-linear, narrowly oscillating relationship.

The stress program provided with TThrottler had no effect at all, perhaps because it uses idle cycles as well, and then AMD Cool'n'Quiet throttles the processor by itself. I could tweak the parameters, but I found it easier to run SuperPI instead to stress the processor. Still an average of 2 degrees lower than NextSensor's readings under stress. So I changed the factor to 11, and TThrottler was consistently 2 degrees over NextSensor's readings. Too much correction. Then I tried 12. TThrottler was still an average 2 degrees above when the system was idle, but under stress the two programs matched almost exactly.

So, it seems 12 is the ideal value for XP in my PC, but I found it better to err on the side of caution and use 11 on Windows 7 (and use 66 rather than 68°C as the throttling threshold). Then I ran SuperPI again on Windows 7. Unfortunately, it didn't throttle. Temperature reached 69°C (as displayed by Throttler's floating bar) and I aborted SuperPI. After it cooled back down to the 40s, I ran Throttler again, this time as Administrator, and repeated the SuperPI test. Again, it reached 69°C, when there was a rule for Throttler to trigger at over 66°C. In such cases, NextSensor instantly cools my processor by some 5 or 6°C, albeit just for a few seconds before the processing heats the processor again. I was expecting something like that.

It seems Throttler is really incompatible with my processor. It accurately shows the change in temperature, but seems unable to do anything about it. Any suggestions? Thanks again.

[fred]

Thanks a lot for the tip. With it, I was able to identify my precise processor family (Family: Fh, Model: 2F, Stepping: 2) and perform some experiments here.

Fortunately, I still have XP in dual-boot with Windows 7 here in the same computer. So, I installed 32-bit TThrottler on XP and compared it with NextSensor's readings. Initially, I noticed there was a difference of about 35 degrees between them. So, I changed the "AMD Factor" from 49 to 14. TThrottler came close, but still 1-3 degrees below NextSensor's readings, in a non-linear, narrowly oscillating relationship.

The stress program provided with TThrottler had no effect at all, perhaps because it uses idle cycles as well, and then AMD Cool'n'Quiet throttles the processor by itself. I could tweak the parameters, but I found it easier to run SuperPI instead to stress the processor. Still an average of 2 degrees lower than NextSensor's readings under stress. So I changed the factor to 11, and TThrottler was consistently 2 degrees over NextSensor's readings. Too much correction. Then I tried 12. TThrottler was still an average 2 degrees above when the system was idle, but under stress the two programs matched almost exactly.

So, it seems 12 is the ideal value for XP in my PC, but I found it better to err on the side of caution and use 11 on Windows 7 (and use 66 rather than 68°C as the throttling threshold). Then I ran SuperPI again on Windows 7. Unfortunately, it didn't throttle. Temperature reached 69°C (as displayed by Throttler's floating bar) and I aborted SuperPI. After it cooled back down to the 40s, I ran Throttler again, this time as Administrator, and repeated the SuperPI test. Again, it reached 69°C, when there was a rule for Throttler to trigger at over 66°C. In such cases, NextSensor instantly cools my processor by some 5 or 6°C, albeit just for a few seconds before the processing heats the processor again. I was expecting something like that.

It seems Throttler is really incompatible with my processor. It accurately shows the change in temperature, but seems unable to do anything about it. Any suggestions? Thanks again.

The temperature TThrottle uses is derived from the core temperature so it is always some 5C higher than the sensor case temperature. But some AMD sensors are off.
TThrottle is used for BOINC. So it only recognizes BOINC programs that are running. See the second tab.
See the first tab "Nr of found programs". It only throttles programs shown there.
If you want to add additional programs click expert in first tab. And add the program name without the .exe in the Program list <ADD>

If you want to use an emergency throttle for only a short while, go to tab 5 rules.
Add a rule cpu temperature > than 70 throttle. It throttles all running programs it can find, but that's a very wasteful process and takes up CPU time.