e6600 not running at 2.4ghz; is this normal?

I finished putting together my new system yesterday and got everything up to date and it is running great. However, I installed cpu-z and was a little shocked to see the processor not running at 2.4ghz. This is my first experience with a dual core processor so I'm not sure if this is normal or not. CPU-Z indicates the processor is running at about 1.6ghz. I haven't touched anything in the BIOS to cause this. I did notice the Vcore voltage was fluctuating so in an attempt to get it more stable I manually set it at 2.225v and that did the trick for that, but no change in the core speed. Is this normal behavior for a dual core system?



Thanks for the help

System Specs:
e6600 CPU
Asus P5W DH mobo
Crucial memory set to 5-5-5-15
X1950
550w PSU

yeah Lyngvi is right this is speedstep throttling down to save power, it does that if the CPU isn't doing much but it will speed back up under load.

You can disable it in BIOS but I wouldn't bother.

Yup, it was the SpeedStep, though I had to turn it off in BIOS and in Windows XP. For future reference, setting the power settings to "Always On" from the control panel power options kills XP's SpeedStep control. Thanks for the help