Tip for 7N400 owners: use CpuIdle

Following on from a few previous posts I made in this group regarding
high idle CPU temperatures with the 7N400 series (7N400-L rev. 2 in my
case) due to the lack of a working "S2K bus disconnect" feature in the
BIOS, and having had no success with Vcool in improving the situation,
I finally got around to trying CpuIdle today.

Much to my surprise, my Barton 2500+'s idle temperature dropped from
63C to 51C after loading it in Windows XP. It happens that a few days
ago a new version was released with the following:

"improved support for nForce2 chipsets- this should allow cooling on
all nForce2 boards that couldn't achieve any temperature decrease
before"

As a bonus, the "OS controlled" cooling mode works, so you can cool
the CPU with no effect on CPU usage monitors. But unfortunately,
CpuIdle is a commercial program and at 30 Euros is quite expensive.
Hopefully, the Vcool alpha will soon have the same capability (sending
in reports to the Vcool author might speed things up).

Gazza

Hi,

Garry Bryant wrote:

As a bonus, the "OS controlled" cooling mode works, so you can cool
the CPU with no effect on CPU usage monitors. But unfortunately,
CpuIdle is a commercial program and at 30 Euros is quite expensive.
Hopefully, the Vcool alpha will soon have the same capability (sending
in reports to the Vcool author might speed things up).

What are your exact settings? With my 7N400L and Athlon XP 3000+ I can
see absolutely no effect using the optimize and the OS-controlled option...

Bye
Marcus

Marcus Lungarotti wrote in message ...
What are your exact settings? With my 7N400L and Athlon XP 3000+ I can
see absolutely no effect using the optimize and the OS-controlled option...

Perhaps you could provide more detail, like what you're using to
monitor the temperature and your BIOS version.

I no longer have CpuIdle installed but as I recall, all I needed to do
was check the box to enable optimisations and leave the setting below
at S2 to achieve the cooling. After changing it to OS-controlled, the
cooling was maintained but no longer affected Task Manager's CPU usage
indicator. Vcool doesn't either--it seems equivalent to CpuIdle in
OS-controlled mode.

Gazza

Hi,

Garry Bryant wrote:

Perhaps you could provide more detail, like what you're using to
monitor the temperature and your BIOS version.

MBM5, the BIOS is F8. I thought about the fact that you use F9, so I
flashed with the @bios-tool from Gigabyte which worked before from F7 to
F8. It statet success and after reboot the board was dead. Thank you,
Gigabyte, especially for the empty DualBios chip position on the board
and the miserliness of soldering the single chip directly onto the board
without a socket.

Now I have 2 boards :-(.

I no longer have CpuIdle installed but as I recall, all I needed to do
was check the box to enable optimisations and leave the setting below
at S2 to achieve the cooling. After changing it to OS-controlled, the
cooling was maintained but no longer affected Task Manager's CPU usage
indicator. Vcool doesn't either--it seems equivalent to CpuIdle in
OS-controlled mode.

It doesn't let me check the C2-State, it declares my chipset not to be
able to use that and swiches back to S1.

Bye
Marcus

Marcus Lungarotti wrote in message ...
MBM5, the BIOS is F8. I thought about the fact that you use F9

It was actually F8 when I was using CpuIdle, but before I gave Vcool a
try I happened to notice that the F9 BIOS was out and updated to that.
So CpuIdle at least worked with F8 and the same would presumably be
true for F9.

flashed with the @bios-tool from Gigabyte which worked before from F7 to
F8. It statet success and after reboot the board was dead. Thank you,
Gigabyte, especially for the empty DualBios chip position on the board
and the miserliness of soldering the single chip directly onto the board
without a socket.

Now I have 2 boards :-(.

I'm on my third (there was the one that died spontaneously, the one I
purchased myself as a quick replacement, and the warranty replacement
that arrived a month later). If only Gigabyte would reimburse me for
the countless hours wasted swapping between them. Oh well, that's one
of the risks of self-built PCs.

The only reason I took the risk of updating to F9 using @BIOS (I don't
have a floppy drive installed, so it was my only option) was because I
had a spare board lying around which could be used if something went
wrong.

It doesn't let me check the C2-State, it declares my chipset not to be
able to use that and swiches back to S1.

Same here. I can select OS-controlled or S1, but it won't let me
select C2.

Gazza