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Intel Turbo Boost monitoring


Grestorn

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I've been trying to see the effect of Intel's Turbo Boost technology. 

 

On my 5960X, I can see in AIDA64, that the CPU clocks to a factor of 35 whenever under load. It never goes below that (since I'm using a watercooling, temperature is never an issue). When using OC, it goes to a factor of 43. 

 

If I understand Intel Turbo Boost correctly, it means that it can get an even higher multiplicator for a short amount of time. And when using the Intel Extreme Tuning Utilitty, this is exactly what I'm seeing: When using the Benchmark mode of Prime95, the "Processor Frequency" as displayed by Intel's utility boosts up to 36 (44 with OC) for short amount of times. 

 

When I'm increasing the "Turbo Boost Power Time Window" this time can be many seconds long. Still, in ADIA64 I'm not able to see that effect at all. Neither the frequency display nor the CPU multiplier ever changes to reflect the Turbo Boost. 

 

Is that a technical limitation? Am I doing something wrong?

 

And, while asking this, the CPU frequency displayed in Win 8.1 seems to be off. It's supposed to be 100 MHz (FSB), but shows 98.1 MHz. Under load it even drops below 96 MHz. The overall CPU frequency also is shown as too low as a result. In Windows 7 the display seems to be stable though. Is this an effect of the changed way the RTC is used in Win 8, which has been noted to cause problems with certain benchmarks? Is there no way around this effect?

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1) Turbo Boost may not be able to shoot up to the highest multiplier because of the activities AIDA64 does when measuring sensor values, incl. CPU multiplier and BCLK. Intel's own utility (XTU) may use special tricks to indicate such Turbo spikes, simply because it makes their product work at a higher speed.

2) On modern processors BCLK (FSB) measurement can only be as accurate as APIC timer measurement allows it. In case APIC timer reflects an unstable or too low value, clock speeds measured by AIDA64 and similar monitoring software will suffer. We cannot really do much about that issue, it's simply out of our control :(

Regards,

Fiery

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