I just installed a i7-9700KF which has a base frequency of 3.6GHz and max turbo speed of 4.9GHz. I enabled turbo boost in my Asus BIOS, then noticed during flight sim the speed maxed out at 3.9, which incidentally was the same as what my previous CPU was boosted to.
I don’t want to do anything risky/void the warranty but I’m confused as to how to increase the speeds safely, by using letting Turbo Boost up the speeds dynamically. In the BIOS the max speed was fixed at 3.6 and the only way to unlock the frequencies was to set OC Tuner 1 (Asus BIOS) which set the ratio to 49 (OC Tuner 2 set it to 50). Performance in MSFS is a little better and clock speeds are mostly sat at 4400MHz. After a 5min stress test in Intel’s Extreme Tuning Utility the temp peaks at 72 degrees after 5mins, which seems fine.
Is there a way to get the turbo boost to more than 3.9MHz without using OC?
Thanks.
First off, it should turbo boost without any game/app running when you enable turbo boost. For example, sitting idle, my 10900K, which is nominally clocked at 3.7GHz sits at 4.895GHz. It is all down to the cooling and power drain - I believe the CPU works out how hard it can push itself within temp/power tolerance. So this suggests that the CPU can’t go any faster than 3.9GHz as it’s getting too hot or can’t get enough power. Suggest you check your cooling/PSU situation. Also suggest monitoring temperatures carefully. My 10900K is sitting at 32 deg C idle - is yours a lot hotter than that? Did you get the thermal paste etc on OK, and are you water cooled or heatsink? Check fan curves etc?
So much misinformation here. By default no Intel CPU should run at max speed when idle. My i9 idles at 1.1 Ghz and can boost to 5 Ghz on all cores all day.
To the OP: Your turbo speed of 4.9 Ghz is with just a single core loaded. FS2020 is a multi-threaded program and therefore your CPU will not boost past a certain threshold due to thermal constraints. There may be nothing wrong with your system and if you want to exceed the default speeds you will need to learn how to overclock. Honestly, this is not really the place where you should be asking for advice on how to properly configure your BIOS + CPU.
There is something seriously wrong with your BIOS settings (or a rogue Windows process) and you are wasting electricity like crazy.
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It might be worth giving the Asus AI Suite 3 a try as an easy option - this has a one-button over-clock function that (I believe) will evaluate your system and then apply an appropriate over-clock.
I have just upgraded to a 10900k, Maximus Hero XII etc. and decided I would not mess in the BIOS to overclock just yet and instead used the above. I have to say I am quite happy with the results, just checking now… if it uses all cores it gives me 5Ghz… and if I am correctly understanding the AI over clocking report will give me a turbo boost up to 5.4Ghz
Bear in mind the Turbo boost feature only kicks in for up to 50 seconds (I think - bad memory here sorry!) and is subject to temperatures as previously stated, as understand it this will either limit the duration of the boost and/or prevent the boost at all.
I would suggest you would do better to achieve a overall over-clock than the short performance boost from Turbo Boast. What sort of cooling solution do you have, does your case have good air-flow, is there good ventilation around your case? etc. etc.
@gordongreig thanks a lot. I think I just needed to reset BIOS settings to default and then set XMP again. Having done that with OC Tuner set to ‘Let BIOS decide’ the clocks still run at 4.6 under load. So I seemed to have achieved the same net result with Turbo Boost rather than OCing.
The only weird thing is that in Task Manager the speed hovers around 4.87 even when idle. No unusual processes in Task Manager. I’ll look into this, though it seems you’re getting something similar.
The idle CPU temp is 32 deg according to GPU-Z but BIOS records it at 30. I have a tower cooler, and I’ve now also set fan curves to turbo.
Why not, people in this forum seemed knowledgeable in this area, friendly and happy to help.
Thanks also @Blitzer303 but my intention was not to OC but to let the CPU manage its speed safely as I was concerned about voiding the warranty by doing something I didn’t really need to do.
Despite my tower air cooler and not great ventilation, temps don’t exceed 60 deg while using MSFS, which is probably why I’m not seeing this - my clock remains at 4.6 while gaming and benchmarking. It’s only the stress test that pushes it to 74deg.
See my post above. This appears to be normal behaviour with turbo boost and seems to be perfectly fine as long as temps are not climbing without CPU load. There is a bunch of articles etc about this - I linked 2 or 3 above.
You might want to check your power profile. If set to max power or ultimate power, minimum CPU usage may be set to 100% - so it always goes flat out. You can change this to balanced (has minimum 5% CPU usage). For me this shows brief drops to low levels but it still hovers around 4.5GHz at idle. I think that’s normal.
EDIT: for example
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You may be fine but it’s definitely not normal and will cause unnecessary power consumption. Either Intel Speed Step or C states are disabled in BIOS, or a Windows setting (power profiles) or process is not letting the CPU throttle down. An i7 or i9 should be at 0% utilization in task manager with nothing else running. This is mine and with Chrome open. I can go all the way down to 1.1 Ghz after a fresh restart and boosts to 5 Ghz on all cores:
It’s not because people here are not willing to help, but you are asking this question if a subforum intended for FS2020 bugs (this is not a bug) and there are way better forums for CPU related issues/questions.
Who should care about electricity wasting on a computer for gaming? I really don’t. Setting the CPU to his max power in a steady state it’s way better for gaming instead of always variating along demand. Of course temperature might be an issue but if not, push the CPU flat out if you can.
