Getting The Most Out Of My CPU

Hey everyone, I notice that my CPU speed will change from 1.2-2.8gHz depending on what I'm doing which I know is normal. However when I try to do things like render in maya and I throw a 100% load on all cores I get stuck at 1.7gHz. How can I get 2.8gHz to make the most out of my CPU when I render? Why would it spike up to 2.8 for say, web browsing but lock at 1.7 while rendering?

 

Its the way the i7 Turbo kicks in. It runs only a bit faster when all 4 cores are at max where if you are using a single thread, it makes 1 core a lot faster and leaves the others at a slower speed. (I believe it functions where it upps the speed a little with 4, then another stage with 2 cores, and then the max turbo with just 1.) It was cool on the i7 920 I built how I overclocked all 4 cores to 3.6ghz and turbo would bring it up to 3.8 with 4, 3.9 with 2, and 4.0 with 1 core. Sadly since we have limited Bios overclocking control, the turbo actually works against us kinda when we want more speed from all 4.

 

So would my best bet be to use SETFSB to the "turbo" setting but leave turbo off so I sit at the higher multi with the higher FSB?

 

Eh someone else who has messed with SETFSB on these will have to chime in till I get mine and have a chance to mess with it. I need to have my hands on before I can tell you what you can do and expect from OC'ing these things.

 

From what I've seen on the benchmark thread, no one has made SetFSB worthwhile enough that is better than what Asus Turbo already does. But you can try if you want. There are tutorials on this forum for G73, just use the search function.

But for Maya, you won't get 2.8 ghz unless you just want to use one core. But seems to me, using all 4 cores and 8 threads would be much much faster.