For people that have the R2 that suddenly notice FPS drop

I have noticed alot of people that say that they have good FPS at the start of games and midway through they had a 20-30% drop in FPS and don't know why. I'm pretty sure it's the turbo boost kicking in then dropping off since it doesn't stay on forever. There are programs that are easy to use that you can hit a button and have your turbo boost kick on and stay on. Just trying to help. I can post some programs I have used and tested with CPU'z and other programs if requested.

 

Yes please, worth investigating at least although I have heard you cannot have turboboost enabled permanently - there is an automatic shutdown of it once the cpu reaches a certain temp.

 

Does anyone know said temp that triggers the automatic shutdown?

 

http://www.tune-up.com/products/tuneup-utilities/features/increase-performance/

Here is one program I have used (free trial) that I went into the turbo mode of it and turned it on and monitoring with cpu-z watched my turbo kick in and it stayed on throughout my gaming on my desktop i7 920. I can't tell you if it will eventually turn off if it gets too hot but i can confirm that it didn't turn off on me during BC2 and I played for quite awhile. I monitored it with my second monitor.

If you try that programs free trial like I did there is some little wizzard for the turbo mode to set pref's etc and I thought that I had force turned it on through the wizzard. Not so, After reading the help thing in the top on the turbo mode which I suggest. There is a little icon in the bottom right on your desktop by the mini icons that are hidden in the bar (mini icons like steam, norton, new updates, etc.) Basically just by where your time/date is on your system! Somehow I know someone will read this and still be looking for it lol. All you do is click it and it will turn your turbo on and in my case at least keep it on. You can click it again and it will turn it off.

Hope this can help you guys with the R2 and mabye even R1. I know those laptop cpu's get hotter faster than my desktop i7 so let me know if it works for you!!

 

A little side note: It turned off that stupid speed stepping which I hate

Also people go in to your power pref's and turn it to the max performance to well... help your performance and your turbo

 

Has anyone with an M11x tried this yet? Interested to see if it could be a turbo boost solution.

 

I've had tuneup on most of my computers and I have it on my m11x R2 and it's quite good, I barely ever use turbo mode on it though because I assume that the m11x is already powerful enough, but I like the other features it has like live optimization and all the other tools in it.

 

I just tried it (I'll admit that I was skeptical) and verified that it does indeed cause the multiplier to go up into the range of TB. With no load, my I5 stayed mostly at 14x and occasionally dropped to 13x according to CPU-Z, with 14x being the maximum multiplier for TB.

 

@Corwin - can you be more specific? You used tune-up (and nothing else major running) and it engaged turbo on all 4 threads at 14x? Have you tried running it along with a game to see if it also keeps the turbo engaged? Maybe set tune-up to run at Low or below normal priority and then startup a game as well to see what it does? It may help others if you make some good discovery here. BW, StevenX

 

I monitored using CPU-Z, while idle my multiplier stayed at 16x -17x 167Mhz for over an hour (this was obviously on Core 1. Core 2 and additional threads stayed under 14x). Was very impressed, but then I ran Mass Effect 2 (windowed) and it stayed pretty much at 10x - 12x depending on whether there was a cut scene or not.

 

Eep sorry missed this reply somehow

I'm not sure how to tell what each thread is running at, but it is certainly true for per core (click for larger version):



With "Turbo Mode" on, I booted up Borderlands and alt-tabbed out to check hwinfo32 after playing about a minute, repeating that five times. Each time, hwinfo showed the cores switching between 12x, 13x, and 14x rapidly. Compare this to before starting the game, where they were rather constant at 14x. I find this curious. Some people have suggested it is due to the temperature threshold built into Turbo Boost that causes TB to be on less time when gaming. Consider, however, that it waivers between the max TB multiplier and lesser ones. That means it is right on the threshold, constantly reaching it and cooling down to below it, doing this repeatedly within a fraction of a second. I find it hard to believe it is staying right at the threshold like that, but if that skepticism is right, what is responsible?

Here's something else I don't understand. Wikipedia lists the I5-520UM as having a base frequency of 1067mhz (approx. 133mhz fsb*8 multiplier) and Turbo Boost of 4/6. My understanding of that notation means with two cores active, Turbo Boost can get both up to (default multiplier)+(turbo boost's additional multiplier)=8+4=12 and the first core alone can get to 8+6=14. Hwinfo32 shows both cores at 14x, however. What do I misunderstand?