System Information reports wrong CPU speed

[bakershack]

I have an AMD K6-III 350 processor on an Asus P5A motherboard. The BIOS reports the correct CPU speed on bootup. But W2K (SP3) reports a speed of 175 MHz. Has anyone heard of this kind of issue before?

 

[reneleb]

I also have an AMD K6/2 350 (supposedly) and an ASUS P5A Super 7 Mainboard. I noticed mine was coming up at 300 mhz. I checked the jumper settings (see P17 of your ASUS manual) and discovered the settings were for 300 mhz. I changed them to the 350 mhz setting, but alas, my system couldn't boot. (Now I know why Bunta set it at 300 mhz.) So, I put them back to 300 mhz and my system runs fine.

However, there is something mysterious about your system, because there is no jumper setting that yields 175 mhz. Also the fact that it initially reports 350 on bootup seems to indicate your jumpers are OK. However, you may want to check them.

 

[bakershack]

Actually, I just found what the problem is last night. W2K does not, by default, load ACPI when installing on a system using the P5A. I had set it to install ACPI when I installed W2K about 18 months ago. Everything worked fine until I loaded a game that, apparently, adjusts its game speed based on the speed of the processor as reported by the OS. That is when I found that the W2K reported speed was half of the actual. I downloaded the latest beta BIOS (1011.005) and installed it, then reinstalled W2K (on a different partition as a dual boot) with ACPI. The problem still existed. I then reinstalled W2K without forcing ACPI. The OS then reported the proper CPU speed. There is obviously a bug in the P5A's implementation of ACPI that results in this behaviour. I guess I will just keep a dual-boot with two W2K installs. I like the ACPI, but I need the install without ACPI to play this game (Unreal Gold). Funny thing is, I played Unreal on this same machine, but on W98. Apparently, W98 and W2K use ACPI differently.