Mac Pro 1,1 CPU Draws MORE Watts @ OS X >= 10.5.3

[jsurpless]

I think this is where you may have hit on your own awnser, speedstep can be disabled in a PC via bios. when your building one for all out power and gaming, ive built a few phase change and water cooled PC's and my last was a 24/7 4.2Gig i7 2 x5870 crossfire ect. you disable anything that hinders CPU performance, speedstep being one of them.

when in the bios of a pc you can disable speedstep, now obviously you cant do that with a MP no bios, but i wonder if 10.6.4 disables the speedstep feature somehow in hardware, as mac OSX seems to be able to give so much info about hardware, can it actually control speedstep aswell? I dont know enough about OSX to awnser that question directly but perhaps someone in the know can. I wonder if speedstep is handled diffrently in 10.6.4?

That's the weird thing... why does it happen to me and not Alfihar

 

[jsurpless]

LOL.

Ok, you suffer from the EXACT thing the 2009 Mac Pro suffered from!

Performance drop with an increase in power, however why I don't know.

Do you have a PCI-E sound card or a firewire drive attached?

Seems like this bug has effected all Intel Mac Pros

I was just reading a bit about the 2009 issue... looking at my XBench results again - a number of test areas increased in performance between the two versions (like CPU) but others (like OpenGL / UI Test) decreased...

Is this the same as the 2009 issue?

 

[jsurpless]

Here's a couple of pictures showing where the reset buttons are,
could try pressing them as it shouldn't cause any problems.
At-least it hasn't for me.

OK, I just tried pushing all of those buttons - multiple times... still no luck :-(

 

[jsurpless]

I have some exciting news on this...

I *think* Apple may have solved my problem... after speaking with them a while back, they escalated it to Engineering and got back with me today... they suggested installing the EFI 1.2 Firmware Update...

Lo and behold, it WORKED... my CPU power draw is back down to 10.5.2 levels... my firmware is now up to MP11.005C.B08

I can't believe it was something so simple... the Apple rep just asked me to installed the update and it worked... funny thing is that I had tried to install it in the past but was unsuccessful...

I just want to take the moment to thank those who offered insight during my troubleshooting...

Thanks!

-Justin