Stability Test for Cool'n'Quiet and Power-Supply

[Mark.S]

I am sure you all agree that Prime95 and Memtest are the most important tools for hardware-testing.

But now there is new a problem i am dealing with:
AMDs Cool and Quiet Feature integrated in the new Athlon64..there is no way to test the stability of Cool and Quiet yet...and believe me, there are a lot of problems with that feature.

A good solution would be a very small enhancement to the prime95-stresstest:
two user-defined variables x and y
--> do nothing for x ms every y ms
so prime95 can switch between idle and full load several times a second, this would put maximum stress to the power-supply and would force Cool'n'Quiet to switch the prozessor P-State very often.


what do you think about this?

[Dresdenboy]

Originally Posted by Mark.S

But now there is new a problem i am dealing with:
AMDs Cool and Quiet Feature integrated in the new Athlon64..there is no way to test the stability of Cool and Quiet yet...and believe me, there are a lot of problems with that feature.

Which ones? I'm just interested as an A64 owner.

[MrHappy]

Originally Posted by Mark.S

--> do nothing for x ms every y ms
so prime95 can switch between idle and full load several times a second, this would put maximum stress to the power-supply and would force Cool'n'Quiet to switch the prozessor P-State very often.


what do you think about this?

you may use the throttle feature during a LL-test
->

you can add this line to prime.ini:
Throttle=n
where n is the number of milliseconds to sleep after each iteration.

[Mark.S]

Originally Posted by Dresdenboy

Which ones? I'm just interested as an A64 owner.

a lot of mainboards have trouble running cool'n'quiet with more than one dimm installed (e.g. shuttle an50r)

and you need a very high quality PSU because of the changes in power consumption (same problem was with the "halt" command of the athlon xp)

[Mark.S]

Originally Posted by MrHappy

you may use the throttle feature during a LL-test
->

this throttling feature sounds interesting, but i believe its not good enough.
how long is 1 iteration?

i am still trying to find out how fast cool'n'quiet is...maximum stress would mean that prime95 pauses just long enough as cool'n'quiet needs to become active...

[Dresdenboy]

Originally Posted by Mark.S

a lot of mainboards have trouble running cool'n'quiet with more than one dimm installed (e.g. shuttle an50r)

and you need a very high quality PSU because of the changes in power consumption (same problem was with the "halt" command of the athlon xp)

Ah, ok. The low quality of cheap PSUs is a general problem. At least, BeQuiet PSU + K8V doesn't cause problems.