Intel Core i-series Turbo Boost Discussion.

So, here's some info from intel about their turbo boost technology.

Most of you who are interested probably already know this, but basically what the technology does is when you have a quad core processor but are only using a single core, it will automatically overclock the core you are using since one core generates a lot less heat than four so they can safely overclock it without worrying about overheating.

I have a couple things I want to discuss.

If I am using only two cores in a quad core i7, will it still use turbo boost, or will it only work when it's just using one core?

If all four cores in a quad core are being used by different processes and such, but only one core is under high load because that's the one my single threaded game is running on, will it still use turbo boost to overclock the core that is doing a lot of work?

What does this mean for the manual overclocking community? Do there exist or are people working on utilities/drivers that let you, say, take a 2.0Ghz i7 with 3.0Ghz turbo boost, and manually overclock it to 2.2Ghz normal and 3.5Ghz turbo boost? Or would you have to disable turbo boost to do manual overclocking?

How well does the technology actually work? Has anyone done some gaming benchmarks comparing a quad core with turbo boost to a comparable dual core?

 

I think this thread has some useful information. In particular, there's a chart of what Turbo Boost can do here.

 

Most people turn off turbo boost when overclocking. You get better overall clock speeds that way and there's no need to run 100000 stability tests to cover all the different turbo scenarios.

Of course, if your goal is insane single-threaded performance, then you're gonna have to overclock with turbo boost on...

 

See the chart. It will overclock with any number of cores (including even all 4), but by different amounts.

If the other cores are not being used anywhere near maximum capacity, then yes.

Not much. You will probably run into issues if you overclock without disabling this (although it is possible).

Very well. I have not run any gaming benchmarks, but I've played around with the desktop Core i5 750 and for all intents and purposes, it's a 3.2 GHz processor as far as scenarios with 2 threads or less are concerned (the nominal speed is 2.66 GHz).