Possible problem with laptop cpu being underclocked

[slick nick]

I am re-purposing an older Toshiba Satellite A215 S7444 to use at school because my Toshiba Qosmio is just too damn big and heavy to haul around school. I was able to get 4 gigs of ram and an amd TL-68 cpu from trading work/parts. I had an extra SSD 2.5" laying around as well so I was able to upgrade some of the components for no money out of my pocket. I am not expecting a high performance machine...obviously but for my needs this should suffice.

So after changing out the hardware and upgrading the bios, the laptop works, but not at the performance level I expected...For some reason it seemed that it ran faster or the same with the TL-58 and 2 gigs ram.

It used to have Win Vista 32 bit and now it has Win 7 32 bit. I had Win 7 64 bit at first, since the cpu is a 64 bit cpu, but I thought that maybe 64 was too much for the current hardware so I installed Win 7 32 bit. It always seems to be running above 70-80% total cpu load and is usually pegged at 100%. I installed open hardware monitor, CPU-Z and prime95 to test out and monitor everything. I ran a stress test and seemed to get mixed info.



Hardware monitor was reading different specs from CPU-Z in terms of clock speeds. Also after running the stress test for about 15 mins, the temp readings stayed at 41 and 49. Is it strange that the two cores are around 8-9 degrees different? Also why does it seem like the cpu is not running at full speed? Is it running as it should be?

Thanks,
Nick

 

[DRDNA]

You will need to go to http://support.toshiba.com/drivers and download and install all the mobo drivers and what not, especially the chipset drivers.

As for using 32 or 64 bit OS, if you want more than 3.5 gigs of ram you MUST run a 64 bit OS otherwise there is no need to go to 64bit OS. You my friend want the 64bit OS for 4 gigs of ram.

 

[slick nick]

You will need to go to http://support.toshiba.com/drivers and download and install all the mobo drivers and what not, especially the chipset drivers.

As for using 32 or 64 bit OS, if you want more than 3.5 gigs of ram you MUST run a 64 bit OS otherwise there is no need to go to 64bit OS. You my friend want the 64bit OS for 4 gigs of ram.

I used Iobit Driver Booster and all of my drivers are up to date. I don't know if I need to download specific drivers that aren't for my specific setup since I changed the cpu but...?

 

[DRDNA]

The chipset driver is for your motherboard inside the laptop, Windows will install a generic basic one that does the job but the Chipset driver from Toshiba for your model laptop even with the upgraded CPU will have way better performance, just saying it would be a good idea and I doubt DriverBooster would even know enough to say anything about the Chipset drivers for your mobo.

 

[slick nick]

How embarrassing... I assumed that there was no setting in the bios to change the performance of the CPU... There was a setting to change the cpu frequency and it was set to always low. I changed it to dynamic and the laptop is running how it should. Now it's time to re-install the 64 bit windows. Thanks for your help anyways DRDNA. I did have some drivers that needed updating btw.