what is the final answer on 801MHz on battery for 7405gx?

For the thousandth, and probably NOT final time, Arima didn't design it to be done. End of story. Unless you want to search for "Power Now"; "Clock Gen"; "Speedswitch" or risk the wrath of Gateway when you whine that your Battery doesn't hold as much of a charge...

It was designed that way by Arima because otherwise the AMD64 processor puts too much load on the battery. If it is running at higher speeds it puts a lot of drain on the battery, causing it to heat up a LOT, and it could even cause the battery to become damaged and no longer function.

We should sticky this so it doesn't keep getting asked.

It is not the laptop at all, it is the lack of technology in batteries. My battery on my averatec lasted 20 some minutes on full power. These will too if they were allowed.

It is the battery that is the problem.

Use RMclock. No "PowerNow! hacks", or overclocking utilities needed. It will dynamically switch just like when on AC in "portable/laptop" power scheme or can be locked to a certain multiplier. I actually use it even when on AC. The dynamic seitching is a little smoother than PowerNow!'s. It moves in 100MHz increments, where PowerNow! moves in 200MHz increments.

http://notebookforums.com/showthread...hlight=rmclock

i may try out this RMClock. my problem with my 7405GX is that it seems totally random what the Properties will say the clock speed is at when i'm on AC power.

i can go to properties, and it will say 801MHz on AC. then, do properties again 2 seconds later and it'll say 1.6GHz. 2 seconds after that it could say 801MHz again.

it USED to say 2.0GHz sometimes, but for some reason, it won't do that anymore.

System properties is completely inaccurate most of the time. Use a realtime frequency checker to see what you are running at. CPU-Z has one in it, as well as some utilities available directly from AMD's site.

olyteddy: You are wrong. The laptop is fully (technically) capable of running at 2.00GHz, no matter on battery or on AC.

What arima have not anticipated is that there are some users who may want that - if CPU is put under all the stress I can think of (LU matrix decomposition of 16Mdouble matrix - helluva stress for SIMD units, L2 and memory bus) it stays barely 27 mins on the battery. However battery is rated for such currents so it is well withing specified margins. So it is only your call if you want full throttle ahead for 30mins or slowly ahead for >3h

Now - how to do it - seriously, I have no idea under Windows. The thing to look at will be to switch off the PowerNow support somewhere - for cpu frequency scaling to work, both CPU, BIOS and OS altogether need to support it - so just take OS support off.
If you switch it off in linux (rmmod powernow-k8) it will lock to whatever frequency it was at the moment. It still poses a problem in powering it up from the battery - it is already at 0.8 and there is no way to put it to 2.00 unless you go AC (maybe I will figure out the proper DSDT) but if it was on AC you can make it stay at 2.00. Actually - for me it is pretty useful - I can carry it around while it digs out through my programs...

Putting it up using whatever RMClock you suggested won't work well - if I understand the DSDT correctly, BIOS will signal a need to step down and windows will do just that. So it may at best flicker between 2.00 and 0.80 which is not good for performance, and may be worse than 0.8 actually - switch causes CPU go to near-inactive state for around 50us when it cannot access memory (it still can dig through L1 etc)... Don't have a copy of Win to test however...

QDot

I clean installed XP Professional yesterday, works at 2ghz on AC or battery. Yay

RMclock works wonderfully. It can throttle better than powernow allows on AC or can be used to lock it a 2GHz or whatever full speed for your particular processor is. I have benchmarked on AC and battery at full speed and there is literally no difference at all.

That is likely because of the old driver. If you have anything besides an SP2 slipstreamed CD, you are using the original XP AMD driver (even with SP1 it still uses the old driver). The old driver locks you at 2GHz.

I have a regular XP Pro CD and SP2 on my thumb drive. I updated to SP2 right after installation. Is there any reason to put in the new driver? The one in there works great as it is, as far as I can tell.

Not if you are happy with it. Check the driver date and see what version (or date) it was. I don't know of any performance problems using the old driver. It just won't work properly for powernow or any other kind of throttling. If you want ot be at full spped all the time, by all means leave the older one in. I think it is a 2002 dated one.

From the Device Manager:

Mobile AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Prcoessor 3200+
Driver Provider: Microsoft
Driver Date: 4/1/2004
Driver Version: 5.1.2600.0
Digital Signer: Microsoft Windows Publisher

Yup, I have no desire to ever run my 7405gx at 800mhz. I am almost always around outlets, either at school, at home, or at the library. No crashes with the XP driver since installation, so so far so good.

As a question of curiosity, do you think that the can the RMclock utility be used with this version of the driver?

Interesting that that version has you locked at 2GHz. That is one of the later ones. I guess "if it ain't broke ..." lol.

RMClock should work fine with that version, but I don't know for sure.

I'll have to give it a shot sometime. I can't imagine what I'd use it for right now, but things change and I may want more battery life later on down the road. For right now tho - power, baby, power!