CPU only running at 45%

[bmw330i]

I just noticed a tiny problem with my system.

 

First here's my setup:

 

i5-750

Gigabyte P55A-UD4P

Corsair memory

Sapphire 5850

 

I used [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] and [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] to get my system up and running on Snow Leopard. Everything works great, including my ATI 5850, but just the other day while benchmarking I noticed some problems.

 

When running MSR tools it always shows my cpu stuck at 45% speed. Even if I place the cpu under full load it never changes.

 

Then I ran the multi64(whatever it's called) benchmark tool with my i5 at stock speed and then overclocked to 4ghz. My system reports the 4ghz overclock, but msr tools has it at 45% and 1.8ghz. Also with the 4ghz overclock all power savings feature were turned off so no speedstep.

 

When I ran the benchmark then numbers were pretty much exactly the same between a 2.67ghz i5 and a 4ghz i5.

 

I have no idea what is going on but it's driving me nuts.

 

Any suggestions?

[bmw330i]

Does anyone know of any other applications besides msr tools that show the speed of the cpu in realtime?

[MacUser2525]

Does anyone know of any other applications besides msr tools that show the speed of the cpu in realtime?

 

Voodoo Monitor it gives both the speed and voltage going to the chip in real time which is really useful to determine if you have working speedstep as well.

 

Edit: And if you want to stress test the system then search on the mprime program it is the Prime95 equivalent for a Mac by the same people.

[bmw330i]

Thanks for the suggestion but after installing the voodoomonitor kext my system now kernel panics on startup and I have no idea how to fix it.

[MacUser2525]

Thanks for the suggestion but after installing the voodoomonitor kext my system now kernel panics on startup and I have no idea how to fix it.

 

If you have no Darwin boot prompt (ie. you just boot graphically) then I believe it is the F8 key you hit while booting to get to it. When at the prompt type in then hit the enter key -s to start in safe mode once at the safe mode prompt do the file check and mounting of the / file system in r/w mode as it tells you how to do. Now use rm -r /path/to/Voodoomonitor.kext to delete it from the system if you had put it in /System/Library/Extensions/ directory then rm /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.kext.caches/Startup/Extensions.mkext and touch /System/Library/Extensions to delete the caches. I'm not sure if will rebuild the cache while in safe mode so you may need to go to the Darwin boot prompt on the reboot to use the -f which will force the reloading/caching of all .kext on the system. Now if you had it in the /Extra/Extensions then use kextcache -v 1 -a i386 -a x86_64 -m /Extra/Extensions.mkext /Extra/Extensions to rebuild the Extras cache you should not need the -f step after having done this one to restart the machine shutdown -r now or reboot will work.

[bmw330i]

Wow thanks for that explanation. I will try this later.

[MacUser2525]

Wow thanks for that explanation. I will try this later.

 

Your welcome one thing you may want to consider is making a bootable clone of your install to test out changes like this one safely so you have zero chance of screwing up the main install. So if you have spare drive in the machine/external usb drive to do it with and want to do it then it is rather a simple process of using the Diskutil programs restore option and installing the boot loader you use onto the spare to be able to boot it, if not sure how to do this I can provide the instructions for the procedure I use for it.