Cool-n-Quiet Athlon 64 Motherboards -- It's a compilation much like Undervoltable Motherboards; could have been an addition to that article but... Thanks again to Joachim -- jojo4u.

An addition/correction:

On my "MSI K8T Neo FIS2R" it doesn't matter if I enable or disable Cool'n'Quiet in BIOS. ClockGen is always able to change VCore and the multiplier.

Now we need to verify: Can ClockGen change VCore on motherboards that don't support Cool'n'Quiet?

One simple edit: the table seems to imply to all the motherboards listed are discontinued.

Nice to see one's own work in a nice article. I hope the information is valueable since I cannot evaluate the quality of the sources.

Today, CnQ is not that important since Athlon 64 leakage currents are not comparable to Prescott ones yet. But without any breakthroughs in transistor design CnQ will get more and more important.

One note about the article: The link at the bottom links to the forum start page not to this thread.

I found a glitch in my logics. It's about the TDP at lowest P-state offered by Cool'n'Quiet. Quoted from the article:

This is not true.
The TDP - of course - is about the power draw at full load. But this figure is not that interesting for this P-state. Because the most time the CPU will be idle when being in this state. When the CPU is idle, the HLT/STPGNT kicks in and the CPU goes to sleep. At this point there is only the leakage power drawn.
So let's calculate how much an Athlon 64 needs at the lowest P-state when it's ideling:
old stepping: 10.5A*1.3V + 2.2W IO=16W(max)
CG-stepping: 7A*1.1V + 2.2W IO=10W(max)

Here my initial post about the new stepping:
http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewto ... 1591#71591
Here the link to the AMD thermal specification:
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content ... /30430.pdf
little overview:



EDIT: post was a little bit confusing, fixed it up.

typo in the second bullet:
"you have to undervolt manually and to sacrify dynamic regulation"

SpyderCat, here's the list of boards that works with ClockGen - I think the answer is yes.

Thanks for the info jojo. So if the cool n' quiet makes the standard athlon64 idle at 22W, what will it do with the 35W mobile athlon64?

No, this was wrong, just look at my last post. About the mobile athlon: according to the data sheets:
2.5A * 0.9V + 1.2W IO = 3.5W

Correction:

Abit KV8 Pro uses the "VIA K8T800 Pro chipset".

http://www.abit-usa.com/products/mb/techspec.php?categories=1&model=176

What special things do I need to do to get CnQ working on my K8T Neo? I have the latest BIOS with CnQ enabled, and I have all windows updates and the AMD Athlon64 processor driver installed... but no matter what, the clock speed as measured by CPU-Z and CPUClock always seems to stay at 2200 mhz on my 3400+.

How long is it supposed to take before the frequency drops?

Hello:

The one thing that I have read is to set the Power Saving mode to "minimum". If you are using CPU-Z to watch the speed, when it works, it happens in about 30 seconds or so after you shut off all programs...

I'm hoping that it works, because this is the motherboard that I am interested in using on my next build.

right you are... setting it to "minimal power management" made it work right away... while downloading a file with AIM, Antivirus, and Daemon Tools running in the tray, the cpu ran at 800 mhz... when I stressed the cpu a little bit, it jumped to 2000 mhz and then immediately back down to 800 when I was done. I guess you have to load the cpu fairly heavy to make it run at full speed.

Cool, thanks!

Anybody know if Cool n Quiet can be used with Linux? What applications and/or drivers, if any, are necessary? Thanks for any help!

Cool'n'Quiet works fine in my Linux machine with 2.6.7 kernel and ASUS K8VSE motherboard.

In the kernel you need
- CPU Frequency Scaling (cpufreq)
- AMD powernow-k8

To change the CPU speed automatically
- cpudyn from http://mnm.uib.es/~gallir/cpudyn/

Excellent! Thanks for the info.

Now, my next question: what *is* the deal with multiple DIMMs and CnQ? The CnQ article says "AMD has confirmed that Cool'n'Quiet works with multiple memory sticks." But I downloaded the manual for the MSI K8N Neo Platinum (one of the mobos I'm considering) and it says "For the purpose of ensuring the stability of the Cool'nQuiet function, it is always recommended to have the memories plugged in DIMM1."

Is MSI just making this up, or is it a real problem? Does it only affect MSI boards?

No, this just means that if You use one stick, You have to put in DIMM1. If You use two sticks, one has to be in DIMM1 and the other either in DIMM2 or DIMM3.

Cheers,

Jan

Hard to say. AMD is clear on this. The statement came from 2 of their tech reps. So I guess you will just have to try it. Bottom line is that if you can get enough RAM on one strip, you'd be better off with that anyway in the absence of dual-ch mem. IIRC, others here have mentioned that board as being ok with 2 sticks...

Couple questions:
1) Are there any Cool-n-Quiet Athlon 64 motherboards with PCI Express?
1a) If not, anyone know of any future product announcements in this direction?
2) In the "Athlon 64 for Quiet Computing" article, Bryan mentioned that socket 754 is already slated to be discontinued. Has anyone heard anything regarding future Athlon 64 mobiles (which are currently all socket 754)?

Edit: corrected article attribution from Mike to Bryan (oops!)

Hello:

I believe that all Athlon 64's will be moving to Socket 939 -- the 754 I have read will be around for a year or more longer, though the Semperon may stick with the 754. Opterons are 940. I don't know for sure about the mobile chips, but frankly, the "regular" Athlon 64's undervolt easily and so why bother with a mobile?

I think the case is currently: buy S754 now or wait a year for S939 w/ PCI Express.

I've read (on some other forum) that there is going to be even faster CPU for S754 than the current top-of-the-line 3700+. Nevertheless, ATM the sweet spot for A64 is 3000+/3200+ level. 2800+ just isn't cheap enough, and the rest of the lineup is much too expensive (well, $400 for just the CPU?).

There's a good article (albeit a month old) at Sudhian about why AMD isn't too keen to release any slower CPUs for S939: Sunnyvale Econ 101: Yields and Positioning of Athlon 64 Now and in the Future.

Cheers,

Jan

Well AnandTech just reported on a new batch of 939 boards with no mention of PCI Express.

As for why mobile vs. desktop: despite the good undervolting performance of the desktop cpu's, don't the true mobiles (1.2v) eke out significantly better performance for a given wattage? Maybe I've misunderstood some of the numbers.

Athlon 64's memory controller can without help handle only two DIMMs. The third one requires external memory buffer present on motherboards (memory buffer is on my KT600 mobo as well). Cool'n'Quiet is not supported if three DIMMs are used because while FID_Change command is issued, A64 can not control the mobo memory buffer. That results in crash or data corruption. This rule does not apply to s939 as there are two memory controllers present, therefore it can handle 4 DIMMs without any problem with Cool'n'Quiet.

Maybe some motherboard manufacturers use external memory buffer not only with third DIMM but also with DIMM 2 ?

You are right. Here a quote from the Aopen support:

WARNING: Do not install amd c&q cpu driver on Service Pack 2 (WinXPsp2) It will corrupt your Log on File. It seems ok to install the driver before SP2. More on next post
Check the following link http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=340353 for the new official (july o4) bios's . Links to chaintech korea and internal server. Download and extract to a bootable (DOS) floppy, or do it chaintechs way, which along with a lot of other things chaintech does I haven't figured out. Load setup default settings before flashing or you may have to reboot a few times to get your computer to boot. This sounds stupid , but change only one setting at a time until new bios is happy. (one of the things I haven't figured out. I swear, once its happy my vnf3-250 is a nice stable overclocker but until it settles down its back to plug and pray.

According to posts C&Q works, and provides access to lower multipiers for fsb overclocking. Not available at usa or taiwan sites I hope it fixes the cpu temp issue

Currently folding at 74C, down from 76, with stupid beta bios. Will try out the 120729 bios when I finish this fold

edit: removed error
edit: added warning

I use only 1 DDR DIMM Corsair 3200 XMS XL 2225 Timing in DIMM slot 1
(all known issues are checked - bios, OS, CPU drivers)
It seems not to work - CPU-Z shows no reduction in CPU frequency!

Installed The bios this morning and it seems to be a professional job for once. I then downloaded the CPU driver from AMD and installed it. When the machine rebooted Windows would not go to log on screen , Lmass ( I think) file not found. I could not use master password to log on to recovery console, and had to delete my windows partition to reinstall. Repairing failed due to same error as well as safe mode. Last good configuration would report restored file from backup then halted due to same error.

After reinstall I installed driver over SP1 then installed SP2 and all seems well. Haven't tested c&q yet as I have a lot of work to do restoring my system

I havevn't even installed video drivers yet to get out this warning, dont know if my hardrive got hit by cosmic ray or what.

Well, before disaster hit I had installed the 7-29 bios on my chaintech vn33-250 with xp pro SP2 and cool&quiet was enabled by default. My machine would hang after 4 minutes. Hearing about an and driver I down loaded and installed it with the previous posts' result.

After re-installing SP1 I installed the c&q driver then installed SP2. The and windows booted!!! But I had disabled c&Q in the bios. When I reenabled it, the windows (loading) screen came up but immeadiatly froze. I re-entered the bios and played around with the suspend and power management setting but windows would not boot. So if anyone knows how to configure c&q I'm willing to try again but I am not going to reload the amd driver

Checked device manager and sp2 removed the c&q driver from the cpu, also the smbus driver was listed as other. Loaded the nvidia smbus driver but I will wait a while before messing with cool and quiet on sp2. I like throwing hardware at my problems anyway

I tried the link for amd's c&q instructions but nothing was on the page, and searching turned up no info. So for a while anyway the Chaintech VNF3-250 is not a candidate for the cool and quiet list

Cool'nQuiet works on Chaintech VNF3-250 motherboard at last. A new BIOS dated 092104 enables C'nQ by default. I have confirmed this by AMD's Dashboard and Nvidia's System Utility. At no load the Cpu runs at 1Ghz at 1.1 volts. The multiplier changes from 11 to 5 and back.

The C'nQ selection has been removed from BIOS power settings and is now apparently always active. Amd's Cpu driver is installed (see my posts above) but not loaded, apparently WinXP SP2 has a new driver which supports Cool'nQuiet by default if MB supports it. It was a total suprise to me when NV sys. utl. reported a cpu speed of 1 Ghz and a multiplier of 5. I guess I just got lucky.

The bios is available at
http://www.chaintechkorea.com/Pds/IPN00 ... y=VNF3-250 This site is in Korean, look for the date, 2004/9/21

thanks to PC Perspective, see this thread for more info http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=352862