Daily Freeware Reviews

RightMark CPU Clock Utility (RMClock) is a small GUI application designed for real-time CPU frequency, throttling and load level monitoring and on-the-fly adjustment of the CPU performance level on supported CPU models via processor’s power management model-specific registers (MSRs). In automatic management mode it continuously monitors the CPU usage level and dynamically adjusts the CPU frequency, throttle and/or voltage level as needed, realizing the “Performance on Demand” concept.

• Real-time CPU clock and CPU/OS load level determination and monitoring (with optional logging).
• Detection of virtually any form of CPU clock throttling.
• Dynamic on-demand CPU performance state (P-state) transitions via real-time adjustment of CPU multiplier (FID) and/or requested voltage level (VID).
• Dynamic on-demand CPU clock modulation via real-time transitions between CPU clock throttling levels. * Fine-tuning of advanced CPU-specific power management settings for AMD K7, AMD K8, Intel Pentium M/Centrino platform, Intel Pentium 4/Xeon and Transmeta Crusoe/Efficeon CPU families.
• Complete support for multi-processor (SMP/HT/multicore) systems.

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SpeedFan is a freeware program that monitors voltages, fan speeds and temperatures in computers with hardware monitor chips. SpeedFan can even access S.M.A.R.T. info for those hard disks that support this feature and show hard disk temperatures too, if supported. SpeedFan supports SCSI disks too. SpeedFan can even change the FSB on some hardware (but this should be considered a bonus feature).

At the lowest level, SpeedFan is an hardware monitor software that can access digital temperature sensors, but its main feature is that it can change fan speeds (depending on the capabilities of your sensor chip and your hardware) according to the temperatures inside your pc, thus reducing noise. Several sensors, like Winbond’s and the AS99127F support fan speed changing, as well as others from Maxim, Myson, Analog Devices, National Semiconductor and ITE, but the hardware manufacturer must have connected the relevant pins to some additional, yet trivial, circuitry. This means that if you have, say, a Winbond W83782D on a BP6 then you’re ok, but not every motherboard with such an hardware monitor chip will be able to change fan speeds

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SpeedswitchXP is a small applet that sits in the system tray and allows dynamic switching of the frequencies of mobile Intel and mobile AMD CPUs under Windows XP. During the development of Windows XP, Microsoft decided to integrate dynamic frequency switching into the operating system itself. On a default Windows XP installation, the power schemes in the power settings of the system panel control the frequencies of the processor.

On Windows 2000 and previous operating systems, it was possible to manually control the CPU frequencies with a SpeedStep applet provided by Intel, but this is not possible anymore under Windows XP. It is not very good documented what the different Windows XP power schemes do and it is impossible to fully adjust the schemes as the important settings are not accessible through the control panel.

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