Hello,
a long time ago I notice some pesky noise from my speakers. It sounds
like high frequency beep. Actually one can hear it on a really high
volume only therefore I blamed this on a faulty soundcard and didnt
touch it. However, once I notice that sometimes the sound just
disappears and you can hear really nice silence from the speakers
(actually the onboard audio on Asus A7n8x Deluxe is not that bad). Thus
playing for some time with this I found that the noise disappears at
heavy system load. The only thing that connects these two events was
athcool daemon "small utility, enabling/disabling Powersaving mode for
AMD Athlon/Duron processors"
(http://members.jcom.home.ne.jp/jacobi/linux/softwares.html).
Although, the developer's website claims that successful work on nVIDIA
nForce2 based m/b is confirmed I got sound distortion. Anyway, after
stopping the athcool daemon the noise has gone. However when I rebooted
the machine that boring beeeeeeeeeeep was back, although athcool was
uninstalled already. Thus I installed it back and found that
# /usr/sbin/athcool stat
athcool version 0.3.11 - control power-saving mode on AMD Athlon/Duron CPUs
[disclaimer]
nVIDIA nForce2 (10de 01e0) found
'Halt Disconnect and Stop Grant Disconnect' bit is enabled.
it appears that the "CPU Powersaving Mode" is enabled even without
athcool. And doing
# /usr/sbin/athcool off
fixes the sound.
Yes, there is a difference in CPU temperature between OFF and ON modes.
It is about 36C and 43C respectfully (when cpu idle), but I'm ready to
sacrifice those 7 degrees in order to enjoy the sound.
Here is the question:
is this the hardware feature (that this bit is ON) and the only solution
appears to add "/usr/sbin/athcool off" string to some startup script, or
maybe I'm missing something...
--
regards,
Oleksandr Korneta
/The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from./
