What Determines A CPU's Ability to Boost Its Core

ttran7701

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Apr 19, 2018
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Intel and AMD have CPU's that can boost their own speeds. I'm not talking about manual over-clocking. What determines the speed/boost of the CPU? Is it just workload threads and temperature? Does MOBO have anything to do with it (Again, I'm talking about auto boost; not overclock)?
 
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For Intel it's almost entirely temperatures (not counting the fact that the commonly listed boost clock is for single threaded and not for all cores load). Except on OEM MB that has been configured specifically to have a tighter limit on power draw which can be confirmed with the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility.


For AMD, it's almost entirely depends on MB and how the MB manufacturer configure their BIOS, Precision Boosting on AMD can outright cause...

gasaraki

Distinguished
Jun 11, 2008
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Temperature of the cpu and power from the motherboard. The motherboard has to be able to provide clean power without dipping, which allows the cpu to clock higher automatically up to the rated boost clock. If you have crappy designed motherboards and bad cooling then sometimes the cpu won't even be able to reach base clocks. (New Macbook Pros for example)
 

FD2Raptor

Admirable


For Intel it's almost entirely temperatures (not counting the fact that the commonly listed boost clock is for single threaded and not for all cores load). Except on OEM MB that has been configured specifically to have a tighter limit on power draw which can be confirmed with the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility.


For AMD, it's almost entirely depends on MB and how the MB manufacturer configure their BIOS, Precision Boosting on AMD can outright cause instability at "stock". Temps is a factor in how high voltage it'll push into the CPU, but generally it'll push way more voltage than necessary.

FYI, using the r5 2600x on the ASROCK X470 Master SLI with the Deepcool Gammax 400 and tons of fans:
- With stock 1.00 BIOS, my system is not able to run 10 minutes of AVX-enabled x264 video encode. PB pushed over 1.4V for merely 4Ghz.
- With the more recent BIOS 1.40, PB finally know to use "only" up to 1.35V instead for 4Ghz and system is able to finish the 30 minutes AVX-enabled x264 encode.

Manual OC, the CPU is 95% stable at 4Ghz @ 1.2V for lower temps, though.

ProOCers Buildzoid comments on how the PB of his R7 2700x behave differently in the MSI X470 Gaming Plus vs the ASUS Crosshair VII Hero:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1DnvthxpnY
 
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