Intel Turbo Boost Question?

This is quite a lengthy question,

To answer the overarching question first, for the best gaming performance on the i5 CPU's you should look at getting a 'K' CPU as it is safer to push, easier to push and will yield much more performance when pushed.

Turbo boost levels are defined by the ACPI and you typically only see turbo boost being used in scenarios when less cores are active or cores are disabled or parked. As this happens at the operating system level, there are ways of tricking this system and making your processor run at turbo boost frequencies 24/7. The way you listed is one way, although that is inefficient especially as newer games are starting to use multiple cores, so setting the affinity to one core and having the CPU run at 200MHz extra on that core is going to yield less performance than having multiple cores at 3.1GHz.

You could invest more into a cooling solution, but there are multiple things which defines the maximum turbo frequency and having a cooler CPU does not mean it isn't limited by other factors such as the number of active cores, power consumption and current consumption. So there would be no point in spending excess amounts of money on a cooling solution.

Only some non 'K' CPU's from Intel have partially unlocked multipliers, not all. The type of overclocking you're thinking of is front side bus or base clock overclocking. This can be done on almost any CPU given the motherboard BIOS supports it, and not all do. There are a few factors that determine the final clock speed(3.1GHz). There is the multiplier and the bus speed. The bus speed for modern Intel CPU's is usually stock at around 100MHz, meaning that for the i5 4440 the multiplier is 31 to reach the 3.1GHz overclock. You can raise the bus speed to increase your overall overclock although in most situations, this sort of overclocking is never recommended. It leads to very unstable CPU operation for minimal increases to performance. Especially skilled overclockers can push some chips, such as 4670's to 3.8-3.9 using FSB overclocking. But this is incredibly tedious and requires a lot of skill, nor is it recommended from a warranty stand point as Intel's standard warranty does not cover overclocking damage. Even their specialised tuning plan does not cover non 'K' CPU's. So it is not recommended. You can read more about the tuning plan here http://click.intel.com/tuningplan/

Again, going back to my previous point, you will benefit more on modern games by having as many cores as possible available for use rather than trying to get a 200MHz increase by shutting off 3 cores. Also, having three cores disabled does not guarantee turbo boost technology being active, again, due to the other factors listed earlier. You don't have to disable cores in the BIOS. There are ways to do it in Windows if you desire.

To summarise, it's not worth taking all these extra steps to get extra performance. You are more likely than not limiting your performance by doing so. I would either leave it at stock or spend the extra money to get a 'K' variant of CPU.

I hope this provided the information you were after

-Member of the Intel Response Squad

Turbo boost is activated when your core needs mo power(GIGAHERTZ) or in other words it's an auto clock processor, intel i5 has the capability of 1core doing 2 task simple as that :)

Hi,

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It's a really nice software.

Bye Bye