Experiment: Does Intel’s Turbo Boost Trump Overclocking?

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[citation][nom]joeman42[/nom]I think you'll find Tom's is doing more with intel tech as it has more features to explore[/citation]

Yeah, the only thing to write about an AMD processor lately is the price/performance. The "best CPU for the money" articles cover that nicely.
 
Nice article with an obvious conclusion. I think that the manual overclock should be same as the maximum turbo boost because an overclocked CPU running at 4.0 is always going to be faster than a CPU running at 3.4 or 3.6 with the help of the turbo, so i think that the comparison it´s a little unfair... It´s also disappointing to see that hyper threading only works in some cases... Well, at least i´m happy i have upgraded to a shiny new Q9550 and overclocked it to 4.0Mhz, is very fast and it´s slower than the core I5 750 or core I7 920 in games! Now i only need a new card to replace my 8800GT...
 
I built a new i5 CAD workstation for our office a couple of weeks ago. I started its overclock tests at about 3.2GHz and achieved the same performance in single threaded apps as I did at stock speeds as a result of turbo. At 3.5GHz it started to pull ahead. I was using a good aftermarket cooler but I got higher temps than I wanted when I got near 4GHz so I dropped it back to 3.5GHz for everyday use. (I wanted to be conservative with temps since this machine will run 24/7, we can't always control our office temperatures, and I know that after awhile lint builds up, etc.)

Anyway, the lesson for me was that for someone that doesn't want to overclock, this chip is a great buy because it does some limited overclocking for you.
 
guys, take a look at MW2 benchmark. there r some minor error there. the title and the legends don't match each other. (sorry for my bad english)
 
A little nit pick, but GPU limited FPS are probably not the best place to test CPU overclocks (especially with 1 vid card.) Perhaps an CPU limited RTS with graphics set to medium resolutions. 1680x1050 in say World in Conflict or something would probably be very real world and CPU dependant.
 
I'm very disappointed with this article. It taught me nothing about hyperthreading, turbo boost, or overclocking. The only thing your tests show is that the i7 and i5 processors are overkill for a Ati 5850, something I already suspected. But the synthetic cpu results do strongly suggest that if you used more GPU power, overclocking will beat the other options...something I also already knew.

Usually you guys do a great job. It's important to clearly define your hypothesis and then test it.
 
[citation][nom]PhantomTrooper[/nom]No one needs a Core i7 for gaming. I'm still using a e8400 with a gtx275 and I run everything fine at 1080p, even Crysis.[/citation]
Remember that not every one using i7 are just gamers. I run CAD/CFD/renderings and the i7 benefit quite a lot. And yeas, I also game with the i7.
 
I have the 1.6GHz Core i7 in my ASUS G51J laptop and it makes a HUGE gaming difference when I tell it to run on "Extreme Turbo" mode.

It jacks up to a cap of 2.8GHz and the games I play run flawlessly at 1080p (Borderlands shows the difference well, I had to play with EVERY video setting down low or even off at 1080P and it still hovered around 30FPS and dipped) With that turbo mode jacked up Borderlands run a solod 50-60FPS with vsync forced on.
 
I have the 1.6GHz Core i7 in my ASUS G51J laptop and it makes a HUGE gaming difference when I tell it to run on "Extreme Turbo" mode.

It jacks up to a cap of 2.8GHz and the games I play run flawlessly at 1080p (Borderlands shows the difference well, I had to play with EVERY video setting down low or even off at 1080P and it still hovered around 30FPS and dipped) With that turbo mode jacked up Borderlands run a solod 50-60FPS with vsync forced on.
 
[citation][nom]apache_lives[/nom]i play GTAIV online alot - your e8400 gets left in the dust there sorry PhantomTrooper, and theres no adverse effects having spare cores for future use with newer games etc[/citation]


Notice I didn't say a Core i7 is useless. I said no one needs it. In the future you might need it. But there is no point in purchasing one at this point. By the time you will actually need it better technology will be out. Gaming is much more GPU intensive anyway, you don't need a super fast CPU.
 
For those of you complaining about ads, you guys are suppose to be interested in computers. I would assume you would have already got a pop up blocker either 3rd party or an addon..

Chris, thanks for the video. I wish more articles included one like you did. :)
 
[citation][nom]Curnel_D[/nom]Great article. On another note, the useless Mass Effect 2 ad blaring it's stupid music in my ears at every new page is really starting to piss me off.[/citation]

Fixed--sound should play only if you mouse over the ad now and not when you open the page Curnel!
 
[citation][nom]cangelini[/nom]Yeah, you guys are going to get a kick out of the upcoming Clarksdale story. It's amazing how badly a Core 2 Duo E8500 gets killed by a Phenom II X4 or Core 2 Quad in some of these more optimized titles. Curnel--sorry about the ad. I also find it pretty annoying to play automatically every time I open a page for proofing. I'll ask about it.[/citation]

Thanks!!!! I have intentionally turned off my sound at work because that ad is so annoying. Now if only you guys will do something about the top banners that pop up into full windows whenever I inadvertently pass my mouse cursor over them. It's EXTREMELY annoying, as with my work based systems being a little slower, I go to click on a link only to find I had clicked on the ad (which hadn't popped up yet) and opened a whole new window with some useless product.
 
[citation][nom]bounty[/nom]A little nit pick, but GPU limited FPS are probably not the best place to test CPU overclocks (especially with 1 vid card.) Perhaps an CPU limited RTS with graphics set to medium resolutions. 1680x1050 in say World in Conflict or something would probably be very real world and CPU dependant.[/citation]

In the real world people don't wanna play games at medium resolutions and settings. We want to game at the highest resolution our monitor supports and with the highest possible settings.

Testing it this way is much more applicable to the real world. Your method would be artificially creating a CPU bottleneck just to show a difference.
 
Aye. Appreciate the feedback Bounty, to be sure. However, it's always driven me crazy to see gaming tests of processors at 640x480 with everything disabled--might as well be a synthetic metric at that point. I thought this was interesting specifically because you get so much variance in desktop apps, and then gaming shows that so long as you're running a reasonable quad-core CPU, performance is solid. Paul's Balanced System Building series shows this really well, in fact.
 
Yep yep. so in the real world, the difference between a $100 AMD X3 or X4 CPU with a $500~900 Core i7/i8 is minimal... as long as you're comparing the same GPU like an ATI 5870 card.

Even a $60 AMD dual core CPU can play many games in very good rates. Lets say it played a game at 60fps, an i7 would do about 90fps. for the $300~400 difference (CPU, mobo, RAM), you could put that money to a better GPU or better monitor.
 
[citation][nom]PhantomTrooper[/nom]Notice I didn't say a Core i7 is useless. I said no one needs it. In the future you might need it. But there is no point in purchasing one at this point. By the time you will actually need it better technology will be out. Gaming is much more GPU intensive anyway, you don't need a super fast CPU.[/citation]
O RLY? What about all of the people who use CAD/3D/CFD to actually make money? There is quite a lot of difference between a i7 920 an a Q6600 when it comes to workstation class work.
 
LGA 1156 socket is waste of money, cause it will not have future upgrades. LGA1366 socket will get 6 core CPUs and AM3 socket will get AMD 6 core CPUs.

Bottom line, get AMD Phenom II 3.4 for $185, nobody needs i7 for anything.
 
[citation][nom]Shadow703793[/nom]O RLY? What about all of the people who use CAD/3D/CFD to actually make money? There is quite a lot of difference between a i7 920 an a Q6600 when it comes to workstation class work.[/citation]

Maybe u shouldn't interject into this conversation seeing as you don't know the origin. I was referring to the processors need for gaming. I didn't feel the need to specify that detail since the intended recipient would already know where the conversation had been.
 
So we confirmed that hyperthreading is nothing but a big gimmick, driven more by marketing than performance? Fanboys, take note.
 
As was mentioned by 'dfusco' I think it would be interesting to determine the effect of over-clocking to the limit that 'turbo-boost' could still be left on. Granted, you're not going to get 4-cores at 4 GHz with Turbo-boost; so full overclocking will still be the winner; but I'm curious as to what speeds you could actually realize at 1-core, 2-cores, etc. On another note and I'm asking because I really don't know, with Mobo's equipped with multiple BIOS saves, can you save settings for normal mode and overclock mode and simply select which you want on boot-up?
 
@ rikhollis. Anandtech did overclocking tests in their i5/i7 launch review. They got up to 3.2 on the i5 with turbo boost enabled. This resulted in a 3.96 clock w/ 3/4 cores active, 4.0 w/ 2 cores and 4.16 w/ 1 core.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3634&p=18

Any higher and they had stability issues as a result of turbo boost pushing to really high speeds with 1 core active.

W/ regards to multiple profiles. Many MOBO's allow you to save several profiles and quickly change between them in the bios. You do still have to access the bios to change the settings though, so it's not just click a setting option on bootup (problem is that system requires a restart to implement any OCing).
 
I have an i7 860 but my Gigabyte (P55 UD4P) MB's turbo doesn't work as Intel specifies. Mine just overclocks the four cores from stock 2.8 to 2.93 and keeps it there. It doesn't overclock one core to 3.5 (for instance) while keeping the others at 2.8. Completely stupid and defeats the whole point of turbo.

I ended up turning off turbo and overclocking all four cores to 3.316. Not a huge overclock I know (+20%) but good enough for my purposes.
 
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