Hardware Turbo CORE technology

[3bbb7]

My laptop has AMD's Turbo CORE technology up to 2.80GHz.

I read you enable it in BIOS.

What are the pros and cons of enabling this? Will I see a performance boost, will my laptop heat up fast?
What exactly does it do? Can it improve gaming performance?

 

[Rydian]

A higher clock rate does means higher heat.

But before we get into CPU talks... gaming performance is most often GPU-limited. If you're using a standard laptop with integrated graphics, more CPU power won't do anything. What model laptop?

 

[3bbb7]

A higher clock rate does means higher heat.

But before we get into CPU talks... gaming performance is most often GPU-limited. If you're using a standard laptop with integrated graphics, more CPU power won't do anything. What model laptop?

Acer V3-551G-8454
AMD Quad-Core processor A8-4500M with Turbo CORE techonology up to 2.80GHz
AMD Radeon HD 7640G + 7670M 1GB
4GB DDR3 RAM

This guy has nearly the same computer as me (minus 4GB ram extra) and he's getting great FPS on games like ARMA 3, which I couldn't do unless everything was lowest settings.

 

[Dangy]

IIRC, his model has 1600MHz and yours is 1333MHz. Not that it makes that much of a difference, but integrated GPU's are heavily reliant on memory clock speed.

And he seems to be getting around 30FPS, which isn't that great for an FPS/AS.

 

[3bbb7]

IIRC, his model has 1600MHz and yours is 1333MHz. Not that it makes that much of a difference, but integrated GPU's are heavily reliant on memory clock speed.

And he seems to be getting around 30FPS, which isn't that great for an FPS/AS.

Well his graphics are on high mode. I can play ARMA 2 on singleplayer lowest settings at around 50-60 fps, but on an online server I get 20-30. It looks like he's playing on multiplayer and is getting 30 fps but his graphics aren't lowest.

 

[Rydian]

He says his GPU is overclocked to 1150mhz... while the stock clock rate appears to be 686mhz at the max.

That's a pretty huge overclock.

 

[Dangy]

He says his GPU is overclocked to 1150mhz... while the stock clock rate appears to be 686mhz at the max.

That's a pretty huge overclock.

Seems like it would overheat quickly or be highly unstable. Weird.

 

[3bbb7]

He says his GPU is overclocked to 1150mhz... while the stock clock rate appears to be 686mhz at the max.

That's a pretty huge overclock.

Oh so the turbo Core wouldn't really do much?
What is GHz? What does having a higher number mean?

 

[Rydian]

Oh so the turbo Core wouldn't really do much?
What is GHz? What does having a higher number mean?

It's the clock rate of the part, basically how often it cycles per second. Each time a CPU or GPU cycles, it does some computations (how many per cycle depends on the part and a lot of factors), so taking one part nad making it cycle faster makes it do more work.

This doesn't mean that one part is faster than another because of more mhz/ghz however, since what's done per cycle varies. It's just if you take one part and raise it, then it'll be doing more work than it did before. He did this to his GPU by overclocking it so it'd run games better, but an overclock like that is likely to cause crashes, and will make the laptop overheat and drain the battery faster than normal.

Overclocking laptop GPUs is not recommended since they have enough issues keeping cool and running off a battery as it is.

 

[trumpet-205]

Oh so the turbo Core wouldn't really do much?
What is GHz? What does having a higher number mean?

Turbo Core is adjustable speed based on workload. It really doesn't do much in terms of performance.

GHz refers to clock cycle. Assuming everything else is equal, higher GHz leads to faster speed. Keep in mind when comparing two completely different CPUs you cannot use GHz to gauge its performance. That is 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 is in no way faster (in fact way slower) than 3.1 GHz Core i3.