question about intel turbo boost

[meshflesh]

I have an i54670k with asrock extreme 4 motherboard . In the options you can choose to set your turbo boost to 4.4ghz.


My question is...is the turbo boost overclock just as good as a regular overclock when it comes to running dolphin? ?

Anybody with first hand experience??


I dont want to gp through the trial and error of manually overclocking if its not needed. Thanks!

[AnyOldName3]

In an ideal world, it would be, but there're many reasons why that might not be how it plays out. For starters, it's possible that you'll only be setting your max turbo boost, which is actually the turbo boost used when only one core is boosted, and you won't hit that level on more than one core. Secondly, it's quite likely that the voltage will be decided by the motherboard. This will mean it'll be higher than necessary (in order to guarantee stability) which can reduce your CPU's lifetime. If it doesn't unnecessarily over-volt, then it's reasonably likely there'll be periods when changing between clock speeds that the voltage won't actually be high enough, and the system will become briefly unstable.

The main thing is that when a human explicitly does everything themselves, there're more likely to be able to find the 'sweet spots' of the system, and the more control that's given to the motherboard, the more likely it is that something will go wrong.

[NaturalViolence]

I'm pretty sure that at least on desktops max turbo boost hasn't had any relationship to the number of active cores for several generations now.

[AnyOldName3]

I thought I saw an Ivy Bridge motherboard bragging about how it's proprietary technology allowed you to decide if you only wanted one core to boost to what level etc, which I interpreted as 'You can do this with any Z77 board, but we're pretending it's just us' which at the least would imply that it wasn't the default setting.

Then again, you're more likely to have actually looked into this than me, so it's reasonably likely I either imagined this, or completely misinterpreted some marketing BS.

[lamedude]

Intel says full turbo with 1 or 2 active cores only, but the mobo's say F that full speed ahead.