GHz G4 TiBook running at 667MHz?

Hi all,

Something is confusing me. I have a 1GHz TiBook running 10.2.8, but I'm not sure if it is running at full speed. I ran across a hint (either here or at macosxhints.com, I can't remember) to check the speed of your processor and tried it out. In the Terminal, you type "sysctl hw.cpufrequency" and it should give you your clock speed. When I did so, the Terminal told me my machine was running at 667. The hint also said that if you reset the PMU, it will restore the machine to full speed. I did this, and after running the hint again my machine did read 999 for a while. I would keep tabs on the speed this way and then without warning and for no apparent reason, it went back to 667.

I know some people have said there is a problem with sysctl, so I haven't worried too much about this. But while beta-testing the Plogue Bidule audio app, i looked at the app's log file and it too told me my CPU speed was 667MHz.

What's going on here? Would this log be getting incorrect info via a sysctl request? How can I tell if my machine is really running at full speed?

So confused... hope someone here can help!

Thanks in advance, Lewis Kaye

blue&whiteman said:

if you guys are worried then just run an xbench and compare your score to other 1ghz or 867 or 667 or whatever.

Click to expand...

Yeah. Did this and I'm still confused! XBench also told me my CPU was clocking at 667MHz, but the results I achieved were comparable to the 1GHz TiBook results found at

http://ladd.dyndns.org/xbench/merge.xhtml?doc1=8337

My CPU test gave me a score of 118.35. Is this comparable to what others are finding? I am going to reset the PMU, run xBench again and compare the results. I'll let y'all know what the score is.

As for the Energy Saver, my processor setting is definitely set to Highest. Also, when I run the Apple System Profiler under OS9, the processor is listed as PowerPC G4 667MHz-1GHz. The OSX System Profiler just gives me 1GHz, but I figured this info was got from a hardware ID.

As for clocking down when the processor isn't working hard, I've been reading on this site about Apple and IBM trying to work this into a G5 chip for PBs, but I didn't think the G4s did this. This would also mean that the processor reading would go back to 999 when under a load. I've checked the terminal when compressing video and it still read 667.

i think xbench grabs the same info grabbed by the terminal command to show the clock speed.

Click to expand...

This seems very plausible.

I reset the PMU and the terminal app now reads 999. I ran xBench and got scores almost exactly the same as what I found before (new score of 118.72 on the CPU test). When I ran xBench with processor performance set to Reduced, the CPU score was 79.62, roughly 2/3 of what it read at full speed, which is what one would expect from a processor running at 667MHz.

The Apple thread noted above does indeed have a good discussion. Seems there are plenty of confused people! Ans Apple tech support could never help with a problem like this. This seems like a Darwin/UNIX bug.