Overlay Question -- Why does Windows report a different CPU clock than the RTSS overlay? Thanks!

I expect it's just because RTSS is measuring the clock in a different way but I couldn't find information on this online. What exactly is the RTSS "CPU clock" representing? I know there is a CPU clock 1-16 option for the RTSS overlay (my CPU has 8 cores/16 threads) and then the "CPU clock" option I'm using below those. I had assumed this was a kind of "aggregate cores clock", but now i'm not so sure (the RTSS option pretty much always reports a much higher clock than Windows does).

I imagine this is all working correctly as expected just wondered about the discrepancy in readings/output and why that might be. Thanks a lot! Side note, absolutely love this tool, RTSS is awesome.

 

Active Clock vs Effective Clock

 

Thanks -- er, that doesn't seem right either -- I see the "effective clock" options in the RTSS overlay options, but those clocks also don't match up to the Windows reading. They're very very low/well below what Windows is showing:
Apologies if I'm just misunderstanding though.

 

Hmm, i'm not sure then, the Task Manager clock reading always seemed like voodoo magic to me, it pretty much didn't work properly at all on bclock overclocked motherboards but is fine on multiplier only overclocked setups.

 

Thanks in any case

 

Compare it to what CPU-Z shows. AFAIK, that one is guaranteed to show the correct clocks.

With that being said, what actually is the "CPU clock"? Some form of average of all cores? If yes, then it could be that Windows uses a different formula.

 

Thanks for the recommendation -- I can give that shot tomorrow after work. Yeah, I'm better that however RTSS measures or averages the result simply differs from how Windows handles it, but I wonder how. The two values end up being quite a good bit different from each other. Perhaps RTSS is measuring the highest clocked thread only or some such. Though I would've expected the "CPU 2 Clock" "CPU 7 Clock" (etc) options to do that while the "CPU Clock" setting I would've thought would be some kind of overall / averaged value or some such.

 

Thank you very much, that's helpful to know. I appreciate the work you do with RTSS, it's awesome.

 

2 anecdotes of mine:
On an lga 775 board taskmanager reported my ram as running at 20ghz.
On a sandy bridge based computer, if I set pstates multipliers too high in the bios with a locked processor, it would report those frequencies in task manager , even though it did not actually apply.

Not something I would consider reliable.