Mobile CPU not reaching full clock speed?

[JaZoN_XD]

Hi all, my friend has a laptop that has an AMD A6-3420M CPU and he's using it with the integrated graphics. So the laptop's been quite slow over the last year and now and just recently, I decided to take a look at it. We found that there were some useless background programs that were running and we uninstalled them. This made a difference but not much. Then we used CCleaner to clear out the harddrive, but it didn't make a huge difference at all. We also tried defragmenting the drive but auto defrag was on anyway so we didn't need to do that. So today, I decided to download CPU-Z and check out what his CPU is doing all this time. Turns out, the CPU has a multiplier of 8-24 with a bus speed of 100MHZ, however, in the BIOS, it said that the processor was 1.5GHZ. Anyways, with CPU-Z opened, I found that at all times, the CPU was only running at 8 or 9 ratio (800 or 900MHZ)! Even if I ran Intel Burn test, the clock speed still stayed the same at 900MHZ, never got to 1.5GHZ or the 24x multiplier. I went and did a factory reset on the BIOS, but it didn't do anything to the clock speeds. Then I thought that it was because it was throttling so I got OpenHardwareMonitor and when I was at idle, the CPU was sitting at around 54C, which is normal for laptops and also no where near the TJmax. Afterwards, I even did a BIOS update to the latest BIOS version and even that didn't fix the problem. Now obviously, the bulk of the slowness comes from the mechanical harddrive but I really don't think the laptop should be as slow as it is! By the way, the laptop is an Asus X53Z with 8GB of RAM (1333 I believe) and 750GB HDD

 

Someone, please help, would be much appreciated!

[Godlygamer23]

Are the Windows power settings set to Power Saver?

[SirSquid]

You got to be cartful with AMD cards, they have a history of showing incorrect temps.

I'd check the temps with a good laser thermometer

[Gofspar]

Set it to high performance and set it to high performance in AMD Catalyst center, if this doesn't help use SetFSB to set the FSB and bus clock to static.

[JaZoN_XD]

Are the Windows power settings set to Power Saver?

no it is on the max performance setting with the processor power management set to 100%

[JaZoN_XD]

Set it to high performance and set it to high performance in AMD Catalyst center, if this doesn't help use SetFSB to set the FSB and bus clock to static.

Alright, I will try that when I get my hands on his laptop.

[JaZoN_XD]

You got to be cartful with AMD cards, they have a history of showing incorrect temps.

I'd check the temps with a good laser thermometer

but how can i check the temps with a laser when the cpu is obviously on the inside...

[JaZoN_XD]

Set it to high performance and set it to high performance in AMD Catalyst center, if this doesn't help use SetFSB to set the FSB and bus clock to static.

Ahh, yes this worked! Somehow, the CPU power was set to 800MHZ to 900MHZ by someone... All i had to do was set the slider to 1500MHZ. Thanks