CPUgenie Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

A: CPUgenie is an advanced CPU power management application, which can reduce CPU temperatures, increase notebook battery time and much more!  CPUgenie has several powerful features that can make your computer operate with lower temperature and/or more power:
- Scalable Dynamic CPU Speed Management – extends CPU speed scaling in the OS
- CPU Undervolting (GreenPower™) – makes your CPU run on lower voltages than factory-defaults, thus enabling more power savings and keeping temperature low
- Power Monitor – allows you to track all important parameters related to your CPU power and temperature and, also, collect important statistics about application power consumption
- Per-Application Acceleration – you can make CPU operate faster or slower, or with different speed management policy depending on the applications running on the system
- Voltage Optimization Wizard – Optimize your CPU voltages without in-depth knowledge of Undervolting. Voltage Optimization Wizard finds the lowest stable voltages for your system automatically, ensuring that stability is not affected.
- Stress Tester with Temperature Monitoring and Protection – puts the CPU under heavy load, maxing up the Thermal Design Power (TDP) and bringing the system to the operational limits. Only under these conditions it is possible to detect smallest stability errors that would otherwise go unnoticed. You can use Stress Tester for your own manual configurations, so you can be sure they are 100% stable.

A: System CPU (Central Processing Unit or, simply, Processor) is designed to run on multiple voltages depending on the frequency. Also, different CPUs have different physical properties and thus can run on different voltages for the same frequency. However, it has been found out that many CPUs have quite conservative voltages and that they are able to run perfectly stable even at lower voltages without problem. Now, why would you do that?
Because CPU power and, therefore, temperature is directly dependent on frequency and voltage – reducing the voltage leads to reduction in temperature and power draw.

A: You need a special tool (such as CPUgenie, which also allows for manual undervolting) and, also, you need to have in-depth knowledge how to set the right voltages and ensure the system is stable. This process can be quite long and ridden with errors. In the worst case, you can set the voltage that is not stable and not figure that out until the system crashes in the middle of saving of an important document!  CPUgenie is designed to automatically find the lowest stable voltages, or, to assist with stability testing if you want to do it manually and this greatly reduces the potential risks of having an unstable system.

A: If you used Voltage Optimization Wizard, voltages found should not crash the system (system might reboot/crash during Voltage Optimization Wizard, but this is a part of the process, not an error!)  - even if you manually override the voltages and crash the system, CPUgenie has a built-in safety mechanism that will disable CPU management in case of unexpected crash and give you the possibility to correct the error or revert the configuration to factory defaults.

A: Once the stable voltages have been found and tested properly (with CPUgenie Stress Tester or e.g. Prime95), it should be quite safe to use them for day-to-day work. However, the process of finding lowest stable voltage should be done ONLY on fully backed-up system that should not be used for any production work during the voltage search/testing process. Depending on the CPU, voltage optimization wizard can take anywhere between an hour and 24 hours to test all voltages.
This is because voltage search / testing can accidentally hang/reboot the computer (CPUgenie will continue testing next P-state once started again) and precisely because of this you should not do ANYTHING else on the computer during the voltage optimization/testing.  In some extremely rare cases, the CPU hang/reboot due to too low voltage can damage the data on the hard drive, so having a backup is strongly recommended.

A: Currently, we support Intel® Core 2 Duo / Quad CPUs. Intel Core™ i7 is not yet supported. AMD CPUs are not supported at this moment.

A:  Apart from undervolting, CPUgenie can also manage your CPU speed dynamically. Actually, CPUgenie relies on Enhanced Intel SpeedStep feature to manage your CPU, but offers some advantages to Windows™ power management:
- Windows Power Management is limited to what is written in your computer BIOS ACPI table. Typically only few power states are defined there and, naturally, they all use default voltages.  CPUgenie not just supports lower voltages for those states, but it also could support all power states that your CPU supports.
- Windows Power Management is only focused on current CPU load, while CPUgenie can also allow you to define special cases on per-application basis
- CPUgenie offers full and easy customization of all its parameters, allowing advanced users to tweak the CPU power management to suit their needs

A:  CPUgenie can run on all Intel Core™ 2 systems, desktop or notebook. However, many desktop systems and CPUs are very limited in terms of voltage and multiplier ranges, so the results on those desktop systems might not be as attractive as on notebook machines.

A:  Some desktop-motherboard vendors have their own voltage regulation logic which completely bypasses VID (voltage selection) registers of the CPU. Typically “overclocking” motherboards are well known to have this feature. In case your motherboard is managing the CPU power, it is impossible to change it from CPUgenie (as there is no standard, every motherboard vendor has its own interface and some boards do not allow run-time changing of voltage outside of BIOS configuration at all!)
If you suspect that your motherboard is overriding the voltages, try to enter the BIOS configuration (e.g. by hitting DEL or F2 key during the power-on, depending on the BIOS vendor) and leave CPU voltage to “Auto” or “Default”. In most cases, this should prevent motherboard custom voltage management.

A:  CPUgenie uses regular Intel CPU MSR (Model Specific Register) registers to read the current voltage and frequency. If the CPU MSR register say that CPU is running on X MHz and Y volts, this is most likely true unless something else is managing the CPU voltage – only in this case CPU-Z reading might be right.

A:  PowerMonitor allows you to track, in real-time, various important parameters related to CPU performance and power-efficiency. You can track the core temperatures, voltages, frequencies and current P-states as well as CPU usage per-application (e.g. you can identify which applications have been taking most of your CPU cycles).  Power Monitor also shows statistic breakdown of each P-state use over time, and also can show default system P-states found in ACPI table.

A:  Yes! Absolutely! Just add your game’s executable file (.exe) file in the Per-Application policy list, and select Extreme Performance power scheme.

A:  This is normal – in order to work properly, CPUgenie will disable Microsoft’s processor driver changing the frequencies of the CPU. In order to do that, CPUgenie will set minimum and maximum CPU power state values in Windows Power Policy to 100%. Setting those values to equal value prevents dynamic speed management by Windows.
When you stop CPUgenie CPU management (or, when you close CPUgenie application), it will revert the settings it changed back to their original values.
In case the system crashed during CPUgenie operation, original values will be restored next time CPUgenie runs (usually, after reboot).

A:  No. CPUgenie requires at least Windows XP to run.

A:  CPUgenie uses WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) to perform read-outs of the ACPI P-states. In case you disabled WMI service or it is not active it will not be able to do so. Make sure Windows Management Instrumentation is ON.

A:  CPUgenie relies on Enhanced Intel SpeedStep (EIST) to control CPU frequency. On some systems, EIST might be disabled in the BIOS. CPUgenie tries to enable EIST if it is not already enabled. However, it is also possible to lock EIST status to “disabled”, which is what some BIOS-es do.  In this case, it is impossible to enable EIST from the Windows Application and CPUgenie cannot run.
If you are getting this error message, try entering the system BIOS (e.g. by hitting DEL or F2 key during power-on, depending on your BIOS vendor) and enabling Enhanced Intel SpeedStep manually.