Difference between CurrentClockSpeed and MaxClockSpeed
- by Ben
Rationale this belongs on ServerFault rather than StackOverflow - I already have my program which gets the value, I am querying the value returned and what it means.
I have an in-house program which audits our company PCs, and one of the things it checks is the speed of the processor. To do this, it queries the Win32_Processor WMI class and gets the value of CurrentClockSpeed.
We were playing with the data today and found an anomaly with some of the speeds being reported incorrectly (for example, CurrentClockSpeed said 1.0GHz, whereas the CPU name said Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T5600 @ 1.83GHz [Confirmed it is in fact 1.83GHz]). I did a bit of digging on the internet and found this blog post which might explain what is going on.
My initial thought was that I could change the program to instead get the value for MaxClockSpeed instead of CurrentClockSpeed, but Microsoft's documentation doesn't clearly define what this will return. What I mean by that is will this return a value which is its actual maximum speed (say if it were overclocked) but which it would not normally be running at, or would it return what I expect, which is its maximum speed under normal (not overclocked) conditions?