Hardware • CPU frequency wrong. BIOS settings ignored. CPU Xeon W3680. Motherboard Evga X58 SLI

The CPU frequency is not set correctly in Debian 12 on my PC. The CPU ratio set in the BIOS is seen as the turbo/boost ratio. I have Speedstep and Turbo disabled in the BIOS, so it shouldn't be seeing Turbo.

In Windows, the CPU clocks stay at 4.25GHz all the time. In Debian, the CPU clock varies from about 800Mhz to 4.25GHz, but most cores don't go higher than 3.33GHz, unless they're under 100% load for more than a second. This causes games to stutter.

I can disable the CPU frequency scaling by turning off cpuidle in GRUB, but it doesn't fix the turbo/boot clock issue. This sets the CPU frequency to 3.33GHz, but 4.25GHz is still used as the turbo ratio.
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet cpuidle.off=1

The scaling driver being used is apci_cpufreq. I tried disabling it just to see what happens. The CPU clocks go up to 4.25GHz more often, but it's still fluctuating between 3.33GHz and 4.25GHz.

I've tried using the performance governor, but it didn't seem to to do anything.

System Specs:
CPU: Xeon W3680 (Stock 3.33Ghz, Turbo 3.6GHz - Overclocked 4.25GHz, Turbo disabled)
Motherboard: Evga X58 SLI
RAM: 24GB DDR3
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1080
OS: Debian 12 Stable; Windows 10 LTSC 1809

BIOS Settings related to CPU:
- Intel SpeedStep: Disabled
- Turbo Mode Function: Disabled
- CPU Clock Ratio: x32 (4.25GHz)
- CPU VCore: 1.4250V

I'm still a noob to the Linux ecosystem. I have some experience installing Redhat on the enterprise side, and I use Debian with XFCE on my home PC for web browsing and games.

Statistics: Posted by dudebefishing — 2024-06-09 06:48

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