Unexplained CPU Spike...

[King of Camelot]

I have experienced a extremely high and unexplained cpu spike. I have a 1.4 GHZ AMD Athlon XP 1600+. The other day I noticed it spiked to 1.6 so I had my monitor start a log. Just today I saw a amazing spike. It jumped from 1.4 GHZ to 2 GHZ. The comp was only on for 5 mins or so cause I had to restart for some changes to take affect. Note, I did not do any overclocking on this sucker. Any ideas what could have caused this?

The log:

+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Total number of readouts: 84            CPU Speed: 1400 MHz              |
|Running from: 11/11/02 3:01:49 PM       till: 11/11/02 3:04:52 PM        |
+-----------------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+
|Sensor                       | Current  | Low      | High     | Average  |
+-----------------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+
|Case Temp                    | 73° F    | 71° F    | 77° F    | 73° F    |
|Case Temp                    | 89° F    | 89° F    | 89° F    | 89° F    |
|CPU Temp                     | 120° F   | 120° F   | 127° F   | 122° F   |
|Core 0                       | 1.76 V   | 1.76 V   | 1.76 V   | 1.76 V   |
|Core 1                       | 2.46 V   | 2.46 V   | 2.46 V   | 2.46 V   |
|+3.3                         | 3.20 V   | 3.20 V   | 3.22 V   | 3.21 V   |
|+5.00                        | 4.96 V   | 4.93 V   | 4.99 V   | 4.96 V   |
|+12.00                       | 12.14 V  | 12.07 V  | 12.27 V  | 12.15 V  |
|-12.00                       | -12.20 V | -12.26 V | -12.20 V | -12.23 V |
|-5.00                        | 0.00 V   | 0.00 V   | 0.00 V   | 0.00 V   |
|CPU Fan                      | 4560 RPM | 4500 RPM | 4623 RPM | 4546 RPM |
|Case Fan                     | 2700 RPM | 2678 RPM | 2700 RPM | 2687 RPM |
|Fan 3                        | 0 RPM    | 0 RPM    | 0 RPM    | 0 RPM    |
+-----------------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+

+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Total number of readouts: 1532          CPU Speed: 1409 MHz              |
|Running from: 11/11/02 2:01:58 PM       till: 11/11/02 2:56:51 PM        |
+-----------------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+
|Sensor                       | Current  | Low      | High     | Average  |
+-----------------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+
|Case Temp                    | 77° F    | 71° F    | 78° F    | 73° F    |
|Case Temp                    | 89° F    | 87° F    | 89° F    | 87° F    |
|CPU Temp                     | 125° F   | 123° F   | 127° F   | 123° F   |
|Core 0                       | 1.76 V   | 1.76 V   | 1.76 V   | 1.76 V   |
|Core 1                       | 2.46 V   | 2.46 V   | 2.46 V   | 2.46 V   |
|+3.3                         | 3.20 V   | 3.20 V   | 3.22 V   | 3.20 V   |
|+5.00                        | 4.93 V   | 4.93 V   | 4.99 V   | 4.94 V   |
|+12.00                       | 12.27 V  | 12.14 V  | 12.27 V  | 12.24 V  |
|-12.00                       | -12.20 V | -12.26 V | -12.20 V | -12.21 V |
|-5.00                        | 0.00 V   | 0.00 V   | 0.00 V   | 0.00 V   |
|CPU Fan                      | 4560 RPM | 4500 RPM | 4623 RPM | 4565 RPM |
|Case Fan                     | 2678 RPM | 2657 RPM | 2678 RPM | 2671 RPM |
|Fan 3                        | 0 RPM    | 0 RPM    | 0 RPM    | 0 RPM    |
+-----------------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+

+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Total number of readouts: 133           CPU Speed: 2057 MHz              |
|Running from: 11/11/02 1:53:43 PM       till: 11/11/02 1:58:30 PM        |
+-----------------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+
|Sensor                       | Current  | Low      | High     | Average  |
+-----------------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+
|Case Temp                    | 73° F    | 71° F    | 77° F    | 73° F    |
|Case Temp                    | 87° F    | 87° F    | 87° F    | 87° F    |
|CPU Temp                     | 118° F   | 118° F   | 122° F   | 118° F   |
|Core 0                       | 1.76 V   | 1.76 V   | 1.76 V   | 1.76 V   |
|Core 1                       | 2.46 V   | 2.46 V   | 2.46 V   | 2.46 V   |
|+3.3                         | 3.22 V   | 3.20 V   | 3.22 V   | 3.21 V   |
|+5.00                        | 4.96 V   | 4.93 V   | 4.99 V   | 4.96 V   |
|+12.00                       | 12.20 V  | 12.07 V  | 12.27 V  | 12.16 V  |
|-12.00                       | -12.20 V | -12.20 V | -12.20 V | -12.20 V |
|-5.00                        | 0.00 V   | 0.00 V   | 0.00 V   | 0.00 V   |
|CPU Fan                      | 4560 RPM | 4500 RPM | 4560 RPM | 4542 RPM |
|Case Fan                     | 2657 RPM | 2657 RPM | 2678 RPM | 2665 RPM |
|Fan 3                        | 0 RPM    | 0 RPM    | 0 RPM    | 0 RPM    |
+-----------------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+

+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Total number of readouts: 616           CPU Speed: 1395 MHz              |
|Running from: 11/11/02 1:11:30 PM       till: 11/11/02 1:52:00 PM        |
+-----------------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+
|Sensor                       | Current  | Low      | High     | Average  |
+-----------------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+
|Case Temp                    | 75° F    | 69° F    | 77° F    | 71° F    |
|Case Temp                    | 87° F    | 84° F    | 87° F    | 86° F    |
|CPU Temp                     | 116° F   | 114° F   | 118° F   | 114° F   |
|Core 0                       | 1.76 V   | 1.76 V   | 1.76 V   | 1.76 V   |
|Core 1                       | 2.46 V   | 2.46 V   | 2.46 V   | 2.46 V   |
|+3.3                         | 3.22 V   | 3.20 V   | 3.22 V   | 3.21 V   |
|+5.00                        | 4.96 V   | 4.93 V   | 4.99 V   | 4.96 V   |
|+12.00                       | 12.14 V  | 12.07 V  | 12.27 V  | 12.16 V  |
|-12.00                       | -12.20 V | -12.20 V | -12.20 V | -12.20 V |
|-5.00                        | 0.00 V   | 0.00 V   | 0.00 V   | 0.00 V   |
|CPU Fan                      | 4500 RPM | 4500 RPM | 4560 RPM | 4542 RPM |
|Case Fan                     | 2657 RPM | 2657 RPM | 2678 RPM | 2663 RPM |
|Fan 3                        | 0 RPM    | 0 RPM    | 0 RPM    | 0 RPM    |
+-----------------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+

 

[Lucky]

Usually that is a miscalculation. You processor clock runs relatively stable, with peak only in the 0.x% range. Anything more would cause you programs to misbehave or crash regularly, as certain program cycles couldn´t behave as intended, especially under a multi-thread environment like Windoze.

Whatever program you use is always a software calculation of the CPU clock, it times the speed by counting and comparing high-level programming cycles. Since the code the CPU understands is entirely different, this is not really a valid way of testing the speed.

The quartz that creates the system clock and the CPU clock runs with a precision in the millionths.

More importantly, as you can read from the numbers, your input voltage level did not change. But this is necessary to change the internal clock speed of a CPU.

So, it was probably a simple software glitch. Also note that you only had it running for a few minutes, this does not exactly account for a sufficient number of measurement points.

 

[King of Camelot]

Duh...................Wow, thanks for clearing that up, I'm guessing you know a lot about computers? I thought it was the software when it hit 3 GHZ this morning.