Today morning, I was checking the specs of my CPU when I noticed something weird. Intel Core 2 CPUs are supposed to slow down when they are not under load. Intel calls this feature “Enhanced SpeedStep technology” and it’s designed to conserve energy. But my CPU – a 3 GHz Core 2 Duo – was running at its full clock speed at all times.
When I launched the Task Manager, the cause of the problem became obvious. The CPU was under load: both cores were fully utilized by ORTHOS, a simple program used to stress-test CPUs and RAM. In fact, ORTHOS had been running for 58 hours. I had started it two days ago to heat up my room in the night, and forgotten to shut it down the next morning. (My Radeon HD4850 is a much better heater, but I wanted to effect a gentle increase in temperature, not turn my room into a sauna.)
Chew on this: Over the past two days, I had been using my machine almost continuously and hadn’t realized I had two computationally intensive processes sucking the life out of both CPU cores! (In the interest of full disclosure, there was a brief moment yesterday evening when I thought that skipping forward and backward in a HD video clip took a bit too long, but I put it down to normal differences between video formats.) If I hadn’t checked my CPU parameters this morning, which I did for a completely random reason, who knows how much longer it would have taken me to realize something was amiss.
Now, that wasn’t the first time that I’d had ORTHOS running in the background while using my computer. Those other times, it was a different experience altogether. Applications took a long time to launch, websites took much too long to load – the lack of responsiveness was simply unacceptable. I would have sworn to you that ORTHOS was crippling my PC.
Of course, the only difference between those other times and the last two days was in my head. Back then, I knew I had ORTHOS stressing my CPU, so I expected poor performance, which is why every single operation seemed slow to me. Without that knowledge and that expectation, my PC was, it seems, perfectly responsive.
Today’s experience will make me think long and hard before I decide to spend money on a new CPU. And every time I hear someone say how much snappier their new Intel i7 rig feels next to a Core 2, I will wonder: would they even notice if I secretly swapped out their i7 for their old Core 2?
I’ve worn eyeglasses since I was 3 years old. A few years ago, I started getting annoyed with the dust and grease that keep building up on my glasses. Maybe it’s old-age grumpiness kicking in, or maybe it’s because I started to use LCD displays whose immaculate picture quality sensitized me to any blurriness between the LCD matrix and my retina.
