Windows Vista CPU Underclock when shipped

[Argonaut747]

I found something out the other day; my system had been under clocked pre-shipping.
I have a Dell XPS 720 with Quad Core 2.4, 3Gig RAM 1TB HD etc. but it's been a little sluggish.

I dug around a little and found the Power Plan set to Dell Recommended. The 'Performance' setting was three dots rather than the 6 dots attributed to High Performance.
I check the CPU Clock speed, (using a Sidebar gadget) and found it to be 1.6. I updated the Power Plan to 'High Performance' and the gadget refreshed the Clock speed to 2.4 after a couple of seconds.

I checked a few systems at work (also Dell) and found they were under clocked too.

Is this just a Dell thing or is it common?
On a lappy i can understand it but a Desktop? Why?

It may be commonly known but I thought I'd share it anyway.

Take care and be good.

Jase

 

[Abarbarian]

To save electricity.

 

[Argonaut747]

yeah, but isn't the power only consumed relative to the percentage used?

Does it consume the same amount when it's idle as when it's working?

 

[Ian]

I don't know if it is actually underclocked - as it is possible that the CPU automatically adjusts to the required speed to save power (especially on laptops):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedStep

To try this, turn back the power settings to default and run a CPU intensive applicaiton - the CPU will then jump from a 1.6 to a 2.4 in the monitoring tool