I realized that speed of my CPU is not constant even if it compute massively. The speed wanders from ~4,2 to ~4,4GHz in task manager. Why?  I have two theorem:   This is an average speed, and even during massive CPU usage there are time slots, where we wait for memory/IO, and the speed jumps back to base speed for a while. The CPU main clock generated with error (jitter/wander), while the measurement using a high precise clock. Other...?     I use Win10
53618
I just got a new Intel CPU, and the specifications say 3.5GHz but with turbo boost to 3.9GHz. What does Intel Turbo Boost do? From the description it sounds like they are saying "The road's speed limit is 100 km/hr, but if you get to that speed then the new speed limit is 140 km/hr". Why not just set the clock speed to 3.9GHz to start with? So what is Intel Turbo Boost actually doing?
22958
An  has an .  The memory is . It has only about 1000 MHz DRAM frequency:      Could anyone provide a clue on why the RAM speed is so low?  Am I missing some fundamental understanding of the speed numbers?
17526
I think I'm being the victim of a bug here. Sometimes while I'm working (I still don't know why), my network traffic goes up to 200 KB/s and stays that way, even tough I'm not doing anything internet-related.   This sometimes happens to me with the CPU usage. When it does, I just run a top command to find out which process is responsible and then kill it. Problem is: I have no way of knowing which process is responsible for my high network usage. Both the resource monitor and the top command only tell me my total network usage, neither of them tells me process specific network info.  I've found questions here about monitoring total bandwidth usage, but, as I mentioned, that's not what I need. Is there another command I can use to find out which process is getting out of hand?  The command iftop gives results that disagree entirely with the information reported by System Monitor. While the latter claims there's high network traffic, the former claims there's barely 1 KB/s.  I've already tried killing all the obvious ones (Firefox, update-manager, Pidgin, etc) with no luck. So far, restarting the machine is the only way I found of getting rid of the issue.
86860
What is a reliable, but not too time-consuming way to determine if a certain game is limited by the graphics card or by the processor speed?  I have some preconceptions about whether I'm mostly GPU or CPU limited, but I'd like to verify if I'm right about that. I have some ideas how I would go around and test that but performing accurate benchmarks is notoriously tricky and I don't have much experience with it.   So I'm wondering what would be an easy way to determine the bottleneck, having only one computer with a certain configuration available? What tools would I use for that purpose?  It would also be interesting to determine if the amount of VRAM on my graphics card is a limiting factor.
71049
I was looking at the stats for the Intel  CPU.   It has two cores and two threads. What do the threads do for the processor? Is there any relation between the number of cores and the number of threads? What purpose do threads serve for the system overall?
119818
My processor fan never runs on full speed event though my processor temperature is going so high. I am using HWMonitor (also speedfan) to record temperatures and my temperature readings in normal are as follows: Intel Core 2 Quad Q2800: Core # 0: 65 c Core # 1: 60 c Core # 2: 59 c Core # 3: 59 c  But during high usage like while playing a game or something it hits around 80+, I tried cleaning the grill and fan and putting new thermal grease but it didn’t help. HWMonitor further says: FANS PWM:  FANSWMIN0: 50%  And from the above reading I am guessing that my fan is running on 50% always and I think it is because it looks slow... Not really making any sound and you can feel any air blowing out of it if you put your hand in front of it. I tried SpeedFan but my motherboard isn’t supported… My BIOS also doesn’t have any such option all it has is: Advanced &gt; Fan Control - Processor Zone Response - Normal - Processor Zone Damping – High - Auto Fan Detection – Disable - Fan Detection Error- Enable  My specs are as follows: Motherboard: Intel DG43NB [Version AAE34877-402] CPU:  Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Quad CPU Q8200 @ 2.33GHz [Socket 775 LGA]  I want to know how to take my CPU temperature to normal again (probably by making my fan run to max speed)?  Just checked processor specification here:  And it says for Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q8200: TCASE 71.4°C  I am not sure about the usage of TCASE.
110896
I am using a Asus K42F laptop (2 GB DDR3 RAM, Intel Core i5 processor), and I want to add an additional 2GB RAM.  According to CPU-z software my bus speed is (532*2) MHz. What will happen if the bus speed of the old RAM and new RAM don't match? IF I install new RAM with a higher bus speed will it increase my performance? Or destroy my Laptop?
11187
I know what a CPU is(I think). It's the thing who's speed is measured in GigaHertz(these days).  However, you hear a lot about a GPU, and letting the GPU take over, not letting the CPU but the GPU do it, GPU-based rendering, etc...  What is this GPU anyway? How can I access it and use it to my advantage? What am I missing out on here?
41441
I wonder what's the difference between a dual core computer and a computer with 2 processors on the mother board.. I think it's something related with the threads but a I don't understand it very well..
31161
I'm using WinXP, and I notice that in the Task Manager, on the Performance tab my CPU usage is 100%.  But When I go to the Processes tab, and sort by CPU System Idle Process is taking up 90%.  I've double checked that things like AVG anti-virus isn't actively scanning, and that jkdefrag is not defragging.  But I know something is taking CPU cycles, because the machine is very slow.  How do I determine which process is hammering the CPU if it doesn't show in the Process List?
122781
I am confused by the difference between "Cores" and "Processors". A lot of the computers are 2-cores, 4-cores. Does this mean that they have one processor with 2 or 4 cores on that single processor?  Also, for intel core i5, it seems that there are 4 CPUs in the task manager, are they referring to 4 core on a processors, or 4 processors with one core each, or 2 cores on 2 processors?
35452
I thought that Windows 8 was supposed to be better with memory than Windows 7. So far, that is not my experience.  When I boot up my brand new laptop (Samsung NP550P5C-S03CA Intel Core i5 3210M 8GB 1TB ) , the Task Manager Performance tab tells me that I have:  8.0 Gb of DDR3 available  of this:  3.7GB is in use, leaving 4.2GB available  3.5/25.9 GB is committed and 1.4GB is cached.  162Mb paged pool, 2.4GB non-paged.  I then go to the Details tab, and I add up the Memory used by all the processes. It comes to about 300Mb. That is 0.3GB.  So what is using up the other 3.4GB of memory???  I then load up a bunch of programs that I use concurrently - notably Firefox (with about 30 tabs), Chrome, Thunderbird, Notepad++, Filezilla and my memory consumption goes up to 4.4GB. That seems about right.  I then work on it for a number of days, hibernating in-between, and I start to get notices that I am running low of memory. The performance tab says I am using 90% or more of my memory. The committed has gone up to 31GB. But if I add up the memory usage listed in the Details tab, it comes to only about 1800MB (I notice that Firefox has gone up to about 1300MB)  So, again, where has all my memory gone?  If I then close all the programs, it doesn't help. The details tab shows little running, yet the Performance tab shows I am still out of memory?  What is using up all my memory?  The only thing that clears it, is to do a restart. Which brings us back to the top of the loop, with the same initial question - what is using up over 4GB of my memory?  I never had these problems with windows 7.  As a sidenote, Win 8 also seems to be very unstable. Frequently getting programs not responding and crashing, including Windows Explorer, which seems to have to reload itself frequently.  Oh, and my wifi connection keeps dying and then I have to run the troubleshooter to get it all running again (my wife has that same problem on her brand new Acer).  So, what gives? How do I get my new laptop to work as fast as my 4 year old Sony Vaio with Win 7 and lower specs?  Anyone got any ideas? Or is this normal for windows 8?
39693
my former wrong assumption: it drains my notebook battery and I've no shortage of RAM. In Task manager you see ntoskrnl.exe is eating more CPU time than any other process. this feature does not appear to be optional and came 2 days ago with the 1st Win10 Update (Win10Pro in my case).  Edit:  I want to disable it, at least to exclude it as a culprit for my (unproven) assumptions. That process never came to my attention in the last 2 months and in task manager's long name it's called "system memory and compressed memory".
14272
I have a Dell notebook with i7 processor and Ubuntu 14.10. When i disable SpeedStep in my BIOS my computer is very fast but the fan runs very often and the battery gets empty fast.  When I activate SpeedStep, then Ubuntu gets very slow. I have tried switching the governor to performance with no effect.  This is what cpufreq-info shows for all 7 CPUs:  analyzing CPU 7: driver: intel_pstate CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 7 CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 7 maximum transition latency: 0.97 ms. hardware limits: 800 MHz - 3.70 GHz available cpufreq governors: performance, powersave current policy: frequency should be within 3.70 GHz and 3.70 GHz.               The governor "performance" may decide which speed to use               within this range. current CPU frequency is 1.17 GHz.   Strange thing is the frequenccy never goes above 1.2 GHz. I have tried starting firefox or compiling a big project.  This is the CPU related output of lshw:   *-cpu       description: CPU       product: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4800MQ CPU @ 2.70GHz       vendor: Intel Corp.       physical id: 43       bus info: cpu@0       version: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4800MQ CPU @ 2.70GHz       slot: SOCKET 0       size: 3581MHz       capacity: 3581MHz       width: 64 bits       clock: 100MHz       capabilities: x86-64 fpu fpu_exception wp vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx pdpe1gb rdtscp constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf eagerfpu pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 fma cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic movbe popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx f16c rdrand lahf_lm abm ida arat epb xsaveopt pln pts dtherm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid fsgsbase tsc_adjust bmi1 hle avx2 smep bmi2 erms invpcid rtm cpufreq       configuration: cores=4 enabledcores=4 threads=8   I got this issue after upgrading from Ubuntu 14.04 to 14.10.  So how to get Ubuntu 14.10 to use my CPU on full speed when needed?  Update: After disabling intel_pstate all CPUs run at 800 MHz no matter what I do. Switching governor by applet or command line has no effect.  Update: After installing cpufreqd, /var/log/syslog gets these messages in a loop:  Mar  3 13:00:03 scala cpufreqd: cpufreqd_set_profile     : Couldn't set profile "Performance High" set for cpu0 (2700000-2700000-performance) Mar  3 13:00:03 scala cpufreqd: cpufreqd_loop            : Cannot set policy, Rule unchanged ("none").   Update: cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/bios_limit prints 800000 (800 MHz) for all CPUs. Where does this limit come from? How to increase it?
90293
I have two desktops (one of which I'm using as a server), my main machine has a weaker i5 cpu, my server has a stronger i7 cpu. On my main machine I am experiencing stutters because the CPU often runs at full load under regular use (strangely, I also use upwards of 10GB of RAM, no joke... The heaviest program I'm running is google chrome).  I was wondering if there was any possible way to share a cpu from one machine over network to another machine as an emulated processor, which could be used by the client machine in a similar sort of fashion as virtual machines use or "borrow" their host's cpu.  This way I could offload work onto the server's cpu when the main cpu is under full load to prevent annoyances like stutter, and possibly combine both of them for more intense tasks (like decryption, compilation, archiving or other multithreaded stuff)  Does this sort of software exist, or has anyone at least tried to make it? If not, is it feasible?  (This sort of program would also ideally be able to offload data onto the server's RAM for faster processing, since the now common gigabit connections get to have nearly the same speeds as a standard HDD this doesn't sound far fetched either)  To reiterate, what I am primarily looking for is the ability to offload work from a system's main cpu when it is under too much load and forwarding it to another computer's cpu over network.
43596
Is there any chance of SMT (simultaneous multithreading) having worse performance than normal CPU?  For example, is it possible for a normal CPU to run two programs one by one and have better performance than running these two programs simultaneously on a CPU that supports 2-way SMT?
5599
I'm getting the following output from top:  Cpu(s): 43.8%us, 32.5%sy,  4.8%ni,  2.0%id, 15.6%wa,  0.2%hi,  1.2%si,  0.0%st Mem:  16331504k total, 15759412k used,   572092k free,  4575980k buffers Swap:  4194296k total,   260644k used,  3933652k free,  1588044k cached   the output from iostat -xk 6 shows the following:  Device: rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s    rkB/s    wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await  svctm  %util sda       0.00   360.20   86.20  153.40  1133.60  2054.40    26.61     1.51    6.27   0.77  18.38 sdb       0.00     0.00    0.00    0.00     0.00     0.00     0.00     0.00    0.00   0.00   0.00 sdd      22.60   198.80   17.40   31.60   265.60   921.60    48.46     0.18    3.70   1.67   8.20 sdc      16.80   218.20   22.20   23.40   261.60   966.40    53.86     0.21    4.56   1.49   6.78   Based on the above it looks like something must be overloaded. But what?   Questions   If its not the harddisk or the CPU then what? It seems as though 15.6% of the CPU's time is spent waiting. What exactly could it be waiting for?