Cool & Quiet: Not For The FX
The table provides for them but they are not supported: The P-states for cool & quiet, which define operating conditions.
Many users don't even care about the thermal power of a processor. That is, until the computer notches up the speed of the often numerous, temperature-controlled fans - for its own well-being. The user's sense of well-being, however, diminishes accordingly, because loud fans have really become a regular plague: CPU fans, Northbridge fans, GPU fans, case cooling fans, power supply fans ...
AMD has equipped the Athlon 64 with an expanded energy management system based on PowerNow!. This feature is called cool & quiet and basically offers load-dependent control of CPU voltage and speed.
AMD also defines conditions with a certain voltage and speed as so-called P states. In order for the operating system to be able to do something with it, a little update is necessary first, which can be downloaded at AMD. This driver recognizes the power use of the respective system and is responsible for changing the P state using ACPI or PSB (performance state blocks) generated by the BIOS. For this reason even the mainboard and its BIOS must support cool & quiet or PowerNow!. If all goes well the processor speed can be reduced in several steps from 2 GHz, 1.5 V and 89 W to 800 MHz, 1.3 V and a maximum of 35 W.
To date, cool & quiet has only been released for the Athlon 64, but not for the Athlon 64 FX. There are, in fact, problems with the registered DDR, which doesn't like changes in speed.
