disabling 'Halt Disconnect and Stop Grant Disconnect' bit

[oleksandr korneta]

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./