CPU throttle?

posted on May 30th, 2010, 2:51 am

First off, JHC Mal....that game was addicting.  I literally played if for about an hour w/ my fiance laying down  next to me watching telling me how bad I was at it....yet she couldn't stop watching either! :-p 

Anyways....to the point....are there any CPU clock speed controllers out there for Windows 7?  I haven't found one yet, and I used to have one for WinXP.  I was graciously provided w/ a custom built laptop by Sony and I got about 4 hours of batter life on my flight home from San Diego to Philly.  I thought, maybe, if I can throttle the CPU down, I could've had it last the whole 6.5 hour flight....maybe could've even run a game of FO!   That would've been cool...playing FO at 30k feet up.  I just want something to turn the CPU usage down while web browsing and up for gaming.  Battery life is key w/ notebooks  >:(

posted on May 30th, 2010, 3:15 am

Hehehe, I played FO on a plane.   I made a mod there too.  It was cool, and you get weird looks from the people around you too.   Mine was a small plane anyways.

My comp actually has one built in, but it doesn't work very well.

posted on May 30th, 2010, 3:39 am

all you should need is under the power management area of the control panel

posted on May 30th, 2010, 8:38 pm

  You can play Fleet Operations online while being on an airplane ?

posted on May 30th, 2010, 8:39 pm

Not online of course.

Actually, if you wanted to buy the really expensive internet, you could.

posted on May 30th, 2010, 9:46 pm

wait do they allow vpns on planes? that would be awesome lol. download pr0n on a plane and email it to the pilot. 

as for controlling battery life. on vista (and maybe there is something similar in 7) there is a utility in the clock area with a picture of your battery which tells you how much battery life is left. click that and set it it to power saver, it will decrease brightness and make your laptop use less cores of a multi core processor. it will also keep processor usage to about 50% max, it extends battery life a lot. that should do whatever u need.

posted on June 1st, 2010, 4:05 am

A. Internet is cheaper if you're an airline member.  B. Power Management is limited.  Throttling the CPU back would save a good amount of power.

posted on June 1st, 2010, 11:35 am

windows vista automatically throttles cpu back on power saver mode, i have a dual core cpu, im on power saver mode so it turned the second core off and uses the first core at 50% max while high performance mode turns everything to max and it heats up fast. does windows 7 have a similar power management capability?

posted on June 1st, 2010, 1:49 pm

yes it does

posted on June 1st, 2010, 2:53 pm

Where is it?  Because every forum thread and tech article I've read says the CPU runs full speed the whole time.  Task Manager will show usage per core, but even using a web browser or Freecell by themselves makes both cores work. 

posted on June 1st, 2010, 3:21 pm

in the cloak area there is an image of a battery, click it and you should see options.

posted on June 1st, 2010, 5:06 pm

I know that.  There are basic power options there, dimming the display, etc.  Nothing about controlling the CPU speed.

posted on June 1st, 2010, 5:19 pm

one of the settings should be power saver mode, to conserve power, this will dim the screen but will also reduce cpu usage. you will notice the temperature of your laptop fall lol

at leas thats how it is on vista, upgrading to windows 7 soon woo

posted on June 1st, 2010, 7:55 pm

The different power plans won't actually throttle down your CPU power usage as you're using it.  I'm not sure that feature is built into Windows.  I fixed the problem though.  Just made it a dual boot.

posted on June 1st, 2010, 9:21 pm

What you're looking for does exist, but not quite in the way you would like. What you essentially want to be able to do is overclock - or rather underclock - on the fly, but to specified settings. This is not necessarily a function of Windows so much as it is of your motherboard. For example most boards which use nVidia chipsets come with utilities which allow you to overclock from within Windows. However, this utility will only work on nVidia based boards. The utility which came with your Sony was probably a similar idea, a utility geared specifically to that class of motherboard/chipset. Some boards may do a certain amount of CPU throttling automatically, but as far as I know Windows itself doesn't. What you might look for is a utility which will allow you to overclock on the fly but which will work for any chipset/board. Keep in mind though that most proprietary boards - and especially laptop boards - don't allow you to overclock.

If you don't know your chipset Google a program called System Information published by Topala Software Solutions. This will be able to tell you your chipset under the item "Hardware->Motherboard"; the chip you care about is the North Bridge.

Keep in mind also that just because Task Manager shows usage in both cores doesn't mean that the cores are operating at full speed and thus full power. It's a percentage of the current upper limit; if the limit is lower than the maximum speed, then it is a percentage of the limited speed.