Different CPU info on Windows and Linux

I believe I may have found the answer. When I disabled the BIOS setting for AMD Cool n Quiet, my performance jumped to 178% of my old system, which is a little bit faster than my very comparable work hardware. A lucky catch, really, since I only tried disabling C&Q because I have beeen having occasional crashes. I also pushed the memory from 1T to 2T and re-enabled memory spread spectrum.

So the problem appears to be AMD Cool n Quiet... which leads to a new question.

EDIT: I have reenabled spread spectrum and 1T and the system is still stable and fast.

EDIT: I have done further testing and have confirmed beyond question that enabling AMD CnQ definitely has a serious negative impact on performance even on sustained loading. And the system has not had a single crash or spontaneous reboot since I disabled CnQ last week (either under load or idle). Previously it would not last 24 hours without one or the other.

EDIT 2010-05-18: After a driver update from AMD CnQ no longer has a negative performance impact. But it still seems to cause system instability, although not as frequently as previously - every few days instead of consistently within 24 hours. A manual crash-dump generated when the system stopped responding revealed all CPU cores to be executing within the AMD CPU driver, so no real luck there except to implicate CnQ without definite proof.

EDIT 2010-12-23: After upgrading to Windows 7 all power saving functions are working properly and the system has been totally stable.

100 deg C is WAY too hot! It's possible that your processor has already incurred some damage. But in the interest of being optimistic, I'd say to run memtest86 for another 2 passes to be sure it's not the memory. Are you sure the timings and speeds are being detected correctly?

Did you check your motherboard for bad/puffy capacitors? If it's not your motherboard, then your PSU is either going bad on you, or is insufficient to power your hardware. That sounds like the most likely cause to me.

Use CoreTemp to measure CPU temps, since it's one of the most accurate programs around. Don't use ATI Tool, as it's incompatible with Windows 7. Try RivaTuner instead.