Why are one of my cores on my amd x2 reading low voltages and not processing as much of the load as the other?

Question

I have a amd athlon x2 5200, and when i run my hardware sensors monitor the second core reads 3.3V but the first is reading at only .66 volt and when I go to the performance tab in windows task manager and put my my cpu under a bit of a load the second cpu seems to be doing most of the work, is my cpu going bad? is it just something with the bios? is the monitor just reading incorrectly? Hmonitor is the program i am using now that is displaying .66 volt on one core and 3.3 volts for the second, when i use speed fan it reads 1.5 volts per core, so is it supossed to be 3.3v total for both cores or 3.3 v for ea. core?

Answer 1

+3.3V is really the voltage of one of the power rails. Default voltage of X2 5200 (Windsor) is 1.35V. Your software monitors could be reading the sensors inaccurately or your cpu voltage has been manually set incorrectly in BIOS. You could try loading fail safe defaults in BIOS.

Task manager is right. Your processor is optimizing one core since you are not multiprocessing. Try running multiple Super Pi at the same time.

Low voltage on one core means the cpu is trying to save on electricity and reduce heat generation when that core is idle.

Answer 2

Well, if that computer is a laptop, it may be"speed stepping," which is a feature that reduces core voltage to conserve battery when the CPU isn't under much load. My laptop does this all the time. However, If it's a desktop, you can disable speed stepping in the bios.