TwinTurbo and Power4Gear

on Asus G73JH

Read a lot of people say these 2 features are gimmicks. Do they generally help performance or keep it the same/slightly degraded?

I set my power plan to Power4Gear High Performance, and TwinTurbo off.

Can anyone summarize what the features do?



Also I think I disabled a widget in my selective startup menu; the one that shows in the upper right and shows the i7 CPU's current speed. What's that called?

 

TwinTurbo is useless. I don't even install P4G anymore, I see no use in it at all. Haven't touched it in months.

 

Power4Gear is usful if you run from the battery and need it to run with a certain amount of power for what your doing at the time or like to have different amounts of power being used for different environments. You dont need a max I7 to just watch a dirty movie and you dont want the screen dimming or turning off during also

Twin Turbo LOL is debatable because all it does is raise your FSB and so its not a real overclock and considering what two turbos in a Porsche can do to a Porsche that doesn't I dont think they can justify calling it that.

Pros:

You get a couple of 100 more 3DMark points on the CPU test.
Some games see an increase in FPS. (can I name any?...Well no)
Theoretically its suppose to make processing faster.

Cons:

Raises (my) temps by 9oC which I deem a no go area unless its worth the performance gain (which its not IMO)
Slows all the games I have tried down lost 2-5FPS
I dont see a difference in the processing speed
Causes my CPU gadget to have a paddy
Is not anything like a twin turbo

High performance and Twin turbo off. Yup.

There are a ton of great gadgets out there (right click on the desktop and select gadgets/select find more gadgets online) Here is my gadget filled masterpiece:

 

The gadget is called intel Turbo Boost, it can be found if you right click desktop and open gadgets.

 

do i need the turbo boost gadget open for the cpu to scale its clock speed and cores? I know the i7 doesnt really have 8 cores but it says it can scale from 8x 1.6 to 1x 2.4

 

No the turbo boost gadget is for your information only it doesn't control the Turbo mode. It has 4 cores and 8 threads.

The boost depends on how many CPU cores are active the more cores that are idle the faster remaining cores can be clocked. When 3 or 4 cores are operational the 720QM will run at about 1.6/1.73 GHz. When two cores are active the CPU may be boosted up to 2.4 GHz. The frequency can be boosted even higher to 2.8 GHz only when one core is working.

 

yeah it says it has 4 cores, but the task manager lets me use 8 cpu's.

it runs at 1.7 at 3 or 4 cores, 2.4 at 2 cores, and 2.8 at 1 core

do I need twin turbo on for it to use turbo mode, or is it unrelated?

is a thread how many simultaneous actions can take place? like even a 1-core computer appears to do many things simultaneously by executing actions very close together in time. but does 8 threads mean it can actually do 8 things at exactly the same time?

 

I never use Twin Turbo but I use power4gear for battery saving.

I just to show off the Twin Turbo to noobs

 

I explained what Twin Turbo does above and its not worth using and I dont know anyone that has really supported its use because of the downside it has mainly raising your temps for too little a gain.

Your CPU has 4 cores and 8 threads, 2 threads per core meaning that 8 threads could be used by a program to do its processing but if all 4 cores are being used it wont be able to clock as high as one and although not many programs about at the moment can utilise 8 threads - they will one day

You normally see the I7/Sandy's giving you two reading 1.6/2.8zghz showing the max and minimum speeds with Turbo boost. This is why the Sandy is so powerful because for instance the 2920XM clocks 2.5/3.5hghz meaning even with all 8 threads maxed out it can still run all of the cores at 2.5GHZ which as you can imagine having 4 separate processors each having two threads hurtling away at those speeds is very fast - Thats what I call twin turbo

 

yeah it seems like the CPU is the real bottleneck to gaming laptops now, instead of the GPU

do I need any process enabled to let it run turbo mode? I disabled a lot of stuff in selective startup

 

Not at all the I7 is extremely powerful when you imagine most games only need 2 cores running at 2ghz and the I7-720qm can handle 2 cores and 4 theads running 2.4ghz that is more than enough. The GPU is normally the bottleneck in most gaming laptops.

 

Well my StarCraft 2 seems to get lower FPS only when I change the graphic settings that say "CPU affects this setting" and I can set the GPU ones to ultra

 

Power4Gear on the G73 isn't really good for overclocking and whatnot. On other non-gaming asus models (in combination with Super Hybrid Engine for example) it is good where performance is concerned. For the G73 you want setfsb probably if you want to overclock. Power4gear is good for power savings, but you can pretty much tweak a normal windows power profile to reduce power consumption the same way.

The twinturbo thing has been beaten to death in other threads, it's probably worth ignoring. TurboBoost on an i7 will usually give you better results, and that's not something you need to enable or disable on the G73, it's there by default (on some systems you can disable it in the BIOS setup). Twinturbo does sound cool though. It has that going for it.

 

It does sound cool but it needs to have cool performance to come with it!

I remember on my G70S I had the P9300 Duel core which was 2.5ghz and when I hit the Twin Turbo mode button on that it overclocked it to 3ghz which was a nice boost.

Some games do rely on CPU processing power and SC2 is one of them because of the sheer volume of bloody aliens attacking you at once

The majority dont for instance most FPS are graphically intensive another game I found that was hard on the CPU was Oblivion.

 

Yes as others have mentioned, on core2 systems (without IDA - intel dynamic acceleration) twinturbo can be good for performance.

SC2 is definitely CPU heavy.

 

Great points as usual man.

 

I was meaning setfsb for cpu overclocking, I think you're talking about the GPU?