Speed discrepancies in 32bit and 64bit OS

Well i'm using a 32bit XP now. When i checked the speed in the System Properties, it records 1.97Ghz instead of 2Ghz. And when it's running at 1Ghz it reports 997Mhz. It's a T7200, so what's with the discrepancies? When i ran Windows XP x64 it reported the correct speed.

 

64bit is slightly more accurate with math, or XP64 just rounds. I'm not too which one it is though.

Regardless, your speed is independent of the OS. It's a function of the BIOS and the hardware that creates the clock signal that your computer uses.

 

3 mhz isn't really that much of a difference and most likely, it's just a difference in the calculation between the two OS.

I thought you could use software like NHC or CPU Z to control the clock speed.

 

I use NHC and from what I have seen, you can not overclock your CPU with it. I can not speak for CPU Z. But if it can overclock, it does so by talking to your motherboard and tweaking your front side bus or multiplier.

From what I have heard though, there is no way to overclock a notebook cpu with software from within Windows. The only way I have seen it done is by pinning the CPU (inserting a tiny wire across 2 pins of the processor and tricking into thinking it is faster). Very risky and only works on certain cpus/notebooks.

Nvidia's Ntune that came with my desktop motherboard has the ability to overclock and change motherboard settings from within Windows only because Nvidia designed the software and the motherboard to work that way. Otherwise overclocking is done from within the BIOS.

 

NHC allows you to control the multiplier of the CPU. Not the FSB speed, which ultimately determines your final CPU frequency. For instance, NHC could make my processor run at 1.33 GHz (667/4 * multi8), but not at 500MHz.