Disable Turbo Boost/Cool and Quiet?

[king3pj]

I often see people tell gamers here to turn of Intel's Turbo Boost and Cool and Quiet modes and overclock their CPUs instead. I'm wondering why that seems to be such common advice though. I can understand why you would want to do that if you are going for a pretty extreme overclock but what about the rest of us?

My previous CPU was an FX 6300 and I followed that advice. The thing is that I'm not completely comfortable with this stuff so I just went with the highest stable overclock I could reach without adjusting the voltage. I believe this got me from the base 3.5GHz up to an overclocked 4.0GHz. The thing is that turbo boost for that CPU is listed as 4.1GHz. Did it really make sense for me to overclock to just under the turbo boost level and disable the energy saving features to make it run at that speed all the time instead of letting it clock down under light use?

I'm currently running an i5-4690k at stock speeds with a Hyper 212 EVO cooler. I just played 2 hours of Star Wars Battlefront with HWInfo monitoring all my hardware.

The i5-4690k is a 3.5GHz CPU with a turbo boost up to 3.9GHz. HWInfo showed that all 4 cores on my CPU averaged very close to that 3.9GHz for the 2 hour session. The cores were averaging about 80% use and temperatures averaged in the mid 50s on each core. For reference I'm running 970s in SLI and was getting 120-160 FPS depending on which map I was playing.

How far above the 3.9GHz Turbo Boost could I realistically overclock my i5-4690k without increasing the voltage? If it's in the 3.9GHz-4.1GHz range why would I even want to bother giving up the energy saving features for such a small gain?

I guess I'm just not sure why gamers are so against Turbo Boost and energy saving features. Those features don't seem to hurt my performance. In fact they actually seem to be working pretty well.

 

[clutchc]

Turbo mode has the habit of increasing the voltage along with the multiplier for the cores that it accelerates (usually not all of them at once). If you leave turbo mode enabled, you run the risk of the voltage spiking and ruining your OC. If you are only going to OC mildly, it may make more sense to forego the OC and just live with the stock speed and Turbo Mode.
The FX-6300 for instance has two turbo mode offerings; 4100 MHz @ 1.425V when only one module is loaded, and 3800 MHz @ 1.4125V when 2 of the 3 modules are loaded.

My i5-4690K wouldn't OC very stable if I didn't disable TM and tweak the vcore. If you are not willing to do that (and more), it may be better to go like you are. But then, the extra cost of the "K" CPU is kind of wasted.

 

[drtweak]

The thing is I'm pretty sure the Turbo boost on both of them increases the vCore as it increases the speed so if you do not adjust vCore when you up the speed you won't get as high of a clock speed. My FX-8320 is at 4.5 with a vCore of about 1.40-41ish and i have not issues. The turbo speed on it is 4Ghz.

For people who want to Overclock though you HAVE to turn all of that off or it will cause the CPU to throttle back when you try to get those high speeds.

If you are NOT a overclock then just leave them on. if you ARE an overclock then you want them off.

 

[king3pj]

Turbo mode has the habit of increasing the voltage along with the multiplier for the cores that it accelerates (usually not all of them at once). If you leave turbo mode enabled, you run the risk of the voltage spiking and ruining your OC. If you are only going to OC mildly, it may make more sense to forego the OC and just live with the stock speed and Turbo Mode.
The FX-6300 for instance has two turbo mode offerings; 4100 MHz @ 1.425V when only one module is loaded, and 3800 MHz @ 1.4125V when 2 of the 3 modules are loaded.

My i5-4690K wouldn't OC very stable if I didn't disable TM and tweak the vcore. If you are not willing to do that (and more), it may be better to go like you are. But then, the extra cost of the "K" CPU is kind of wasted.

I understand why you wouldn't want to leave Turbo Boost enabled and overclock your CPU at the same time. I guess my question was more along the lines of why do people bother with modest overclocks when Turbo Boost appears to do the same thing? Maybe my i5-4690k just stays near maximum Turbo Clock speed the whole time I'm gaming because I'm running a Hyper 212 EVO instead of the stock fan.

I also get that I kind of wasted money going with the K version of my CPU if I'm not going to overclock. When I bought it I fully intended to overclock. That's why I bought the Hyper 212 EVO as well.

I just haven't found a reason to overclock it yet. Even at base speeds with Turbo Boost enabled it has kept up with my SLI 970s nicely. As far as I know none of my games' framerates have been limited by my CPU.

Maybe I'll still overclock at some point if the i5-4690k starts bottleknecking me in some games. Like I said though, I'm not super confident with overclocking so I prefer to just adjust the multiplier and leave the voltage alone. Maybe I'm wrong but I doubt this CPU will overclock to far past the 3.9GHz boost speed without increasing the voltage so I don't see the point.

 

[clutchc]

I guess my question was more along the lines of why do people bother with modest overclocks when Turbo Boost appears to do the same thing?

I don't know if or why anyone would. Maybe they just like to experiment. Or are trying to learn.

 

[king3pj]

I guess my question was more along the lines of why do people bother with modest overclocks when Turbo Boost appears to do the same thing?

I don't know if or why anyone would. Maybe they just like to experiment. Or are trying to learn.

I see you have the same CPU as me overclocked to 4.5GHz. That's a pretty big jump from the standard base clock. Do you see a pretty big improvement in gaming because of your overclock?

Maybe I've been looking at this all wrong but I didn't think an overclock would do much, if anything for my performance since HWInfo never shows my CPU cores being maxed out. They might spike at 100% for the maximum usage when something is first opening up but the average usage is always quite a bit lower than that.

Star Wars Battlefront is actually the highest usage I have seen my cores average at around 80%. Both of my GPUs were averaging around 90% core usage so I'm still not sure the CPU was the limiting factor though. Either way I was pushing 120-160FPS depending on the map and I only have a 60Hz monitor so it wasn't a big issue either way.

 

[clutchc]

I see you have the same CPU as me overclocked to 4.5GHz. That's a pretty big jump from the standard base clock. Do you see a pretty big improvement in gaming because of your overclock?

Enough to make it worthwhile, yes. About a 5% to 15% performance increase depending on the game. This is a comparison of my Firestrike scores with my R9-290X I had installed at the time: http://www.3dmark.com/compare/fs/4284220/fs/5723807
But Firestrike is more geared to the GPU than the CPU. You can see that in the physics score. It is the only thing that really shows an improvement due to the nature of Firestrike. Probably not the best example I could have used...

 

[king3pj]

I see you have the same CPU as me overclocked to 4.5GHz. That's a pretty big jump from the standard base clock. Do you see a pretty big improvement in gaming because of your overclock?

Enough to make it worthwhile, yes. About a 5% to 15% performance increase depending on the game. This is a comparison of my Firestrike scores with my R9-290X I had installed at the time: http://www.3dmark.com/compare/fs/4284220/fs/5723807
But Firestrike is more geared to the GPU than the CPU. You can see that in the physics score. It is the only thing that really shows an improvement due to the nature of Firestrike. Probably not the best example I could have used...

Hmm... Well thanks for the feedback. Maybe I'll spend my weekend trying to get a stable overclock above 4.0GHz.

 

[drtweak]

Another thing, like with AMD at least, when you have turbo boot on the speed of the CPU is always going up and down as it is needed. When you overclock it is stuck at the speed and doesn't go down or up. This way you kinda always have that speed no matter what. I do a lot of video editing and converting (Converting a few TB of animes to .MP4) and using my AMD @ 4.5 vs stock settings helps A LOT. I get about a 30% increase in conversion times over stock speeds.