Waterfall & Rain confusion

[GPo]

Can someone help me. I have installed Waterfall Pro, and also Rain 1.0. I thought the Idea of these programs was to Idle the CPU down when it was not being used. Waterfall has a setting that throttles the CPU down when the load gets high. This is the opposite of what I was looking for. I wanted my CPU to throttle back when it was at low load.Is this not correct ? Also I'm not even sure if rain is working, There does not appear to be any settings, all I see is the title page. I have CPU clock software that shows my actual CPU speed and I thought i would see it back off at low load.
confused GPo

[Roy]

I have been using Rain because it is considered the best for keeping the CPU cool. It really works. CPU FSB speed remains a constant. I'm not quite sure what changes, besides temperature.

On my BX6-2 with CPU internal thermal diode monitoring via MotherBoard Monitor, it lowered the temp by 15-20*F. It was interesting to watch it jump up when the demand went up and fall quickly back down when idle. On average, the CPU ran about 10*F above the ambient case temp. It also is interesting to note that the CPU temp runs higher when the bus speed is increased, all else being the same.

Waterfall does more things and uses more system resources.

[GPo]

Thanks Roy,
In order to do the "COOLING" the CPU speed would back off, correct ? I see no evidence of that. I have no CPU core temp read out (BH6) so I am going by drop in CPU speed. CPU clock software.I will try CPU Idle, maybe it will show me what I want.
GPo

[800XL]

Rain, Waterfall, CPUIdle, and whatever other software coolers are out there do what they do by using the HLT instruction of the CPU. They do not "throttle back" the CPU, they effectively tell it to go to sleep for a cycle. The HLT instruction tells the CPU to go into a low power standby mode for a cycle. Software coolers monitor system activity, and issue a HLT instruction to fill as many of the idle CPU cycles as they can. Without them, the CPU would sit at full power doing nothing, instead of dropping power use and sleeping away the clock cycle.

You won't see the speed back off and you will not see the CPU load back off when these cooling programs are active. What you may see, is that the CPU load goes up to 100%, which is correct. The CPU is excuting an instruction, even though that instruction (HLT) says to sleep.


These things don't work like the turbo switch of old, cutting back the Mhz the CPU is running at. They exploit a formerly little used instruction in the x86 CPU instruction set that allows the CPU to consume less power. Windows NT 4.0 actually has the same function built into its kernel.

[GPo]

Thanks 800XL,
I guess the only way to see what I want is to install a remote thermistor. For now I will assume the software is doing it's job.
I only have a general mobo temp sensor.
GPo