Is there something wrong with my CPU?

I was looking only at the manufacturer's forums so I didn't see this forum until now. I posted this thread down in the HP forum, maybe it's better here.

Anyhow, I'm using an old HP Pavilion zv6000 laptop. A few days ago I noticed on the System Information tab that my processor (AMD Athlon 3200+) was listed as being 997MHz. That didn't seem right to me as I thought it was closer to 2GHz. The next day I looked and got the same reading. Finally yesterday I looked up the specs for my system and saw it was a 2.0GHz processor. When I checked again, it was now listed back at the normal 1.99GHz.

Does anyone know why it would suddenly be shown so low? Is there a problem with my processor? I don't know what might cause this, so I'm a little concerned.

 

I believe that the system shows only what's the current used MHz. Your comp would throttle down when no extra CPU usage is being needed, to cool down the notebook and extend the battery life.

cheers ...

 

With Intel processors, this is called SpeedStep. It downclocks the processor when it's not being used to its full capacity. I'm not sure what it's called with AMD, but the principle is the same. If you do anything that uses a lot of CPU power, then it will clock up to the full 2.0GHz.

 

I believe it is called "Power Now! with Cool n' Quiet Technology" in AMD processors. Basically, it is as Mastershroom said: the processor will downclock to save power and reduce heat output when it is not under load.

If you really want to verify, go launch a demanding application, and then right away, open up the system information again. It should say the full clock speed.

In short, it's nothing to be worried about. If your processor is always at maximum speed, that would be even more worrying

 

Yeah, like other guys say, If you anway want to test;
Download Prime95 and start torture your CPU and RAM so you can see how fast it will clock up

 

Ok, thanks for the information everyone. I'll give it a try when I start running some heavy apps.

 

Let uss know the result
And like I wrote above, Prime95 gives you a jump to 100% CPU ussage in <1 MS

 

You just told him the results.

 

I think that what all of them said earlier is correct. i had a very old laptop and when i used to check the system info sometime it showed the processor as being 600+mhz and sometime 1.6ghz. I believe that this should be the case in ur laptop. By the way this only occured on windowsx xp and not in vista so what is ur os? In vista it would show 2.0ghz most likely

 

Um... no

It takes like 100ms from the time click the mouse to when the computer responds to your action.

 

Uh, dear god!
Don't tell me that you didn't understand what my point was ?!

 

I am using XP. I did check the info when I was running some games and it showed at 1.99GHz but when I'm not doing much, like now, it's down to 997MHz.

Thanks again for all the info.