#HOW TO ENABLE TURBO BOOST AW17 R2 PDF#
#HOW TO ENABLE TURBO BOOST AW17 R2 PC#

The relatively low base clock speed on Ice Lake 15W CPUs means you don’t have nearly as much performance to work with once Turbo Boost is off, while the smaller number of CPU cores means you can’t lean as heavily on parallelism to keep performance up. Multi-core performance falls from 1689 to 743, a drop of 43 percent.

Without Turbo Boost, the laptop sits at 1.3GHz no matter what, whether it’s running single-core or all-core. Single core boosts up to 3.67GHz in our test run. With Turbo on, the CPU bursts up to 3.5GHz before settling back down to 2.7 – 2.8GHz. With Turbo Mode enabled, the CPU turned in a score of 1689 for multi-core and 464 for single-core. I tested the Surface Laptop 3 in Cinebench R20 with Turbo Boost enabled and disabled. If you turn off Turbo Boost on, say, the new Intel Surface Laptop 3 with a Core i7-1065G7, you’re going to wind up at a much lower base clock. An eight-core Intel Core i9 does pretty well at just 2.4GHz, and Marco reports being pretty satisfied with performance. If you turn off Turbo Mode, your CPU will run at a maximum of 2.4GHz on all eight cores. The 9980HK in Marco’s laptop has a base clock of 2.4GHz and a boost clock of 5GHz. There is, however, one reason why low-power laptop users might want to avoid this kind of trick. If I can nearly triple a machine’s battery life by aggressive throttling and voltage changes, I can easily believe a 30-50 percent improvement just from disabling Turbo Boost. The reason I’m bringing it up is to demonstrate that the 30-50 percent battery life improvement that Marco Ament is talking about isn’t a crazy claim. To hit that target, I’m throttling the CPU to within an inch of its life by using XTU to lower the 7700HQ’s default voltage and IccMax. I want to be very clear here: I’m not just disabling Turbo Boost to get that kind of improvement. I wish I had a formal benchmark to show - like Marco, I don’t - but I have timed the actual run-time I got on an airplane while watching movies, and clocked it as just short of six hours, compared to a little over two for the standard configuration.

#HOW TO ENABLE TURBO BOOST AW17 R2 PC#

Why do I bother? Because it virtually triples the runtime I get out of the laptop when watching video or doing basic desktop work, and the amount of time I gain is orders of magnitude larger than the time I spend waiting on the PC (the lag is detectable, but it’s well under a second).

#HOW TO ENABLE TURBO BOOST AW17 R2 PDF#

I can write stories or alt-tab between a document and a PDF to make slides and I can still play movies and TV shows flawlessly, but it’s not particularly useful for anything else. I’m not even going to pretend that the user experience is good in this configuration, as the machine is slow enough to visibly lag. When I travel, I’ll often tighten various amperage and power settings until the laptop is locked at 800MHz.

You can check the list of supported CPUs for XTU here, but not every chip is listed - the 7700HQ itself, for example, isn’t.Īssuming you have access to XTU and you’re willing to muck around with your laptop’s power configuration (completely at your own risk), you can actually achieve some astonishing improvements at the cost of making a system incredibly slow. Some laptops may also offer UEFI options for adjusting Turbo Boost timing and parameters, though laptop UEFI is typically more locked-down than desktop parts.

The advantage of using Intel’s XTU was that I got more granularity to play with the actual Turbo Boost settings, though this utility isn’t supported on every Intel laptop. I used Intel’s XTU utility for this, but there are other ways to disable Turbo Boost, including programs like Throttlestop. I figured two hours was all you could expect to get out of a gaming laptop, but since I wanted more battery for long flights, I decided to test the impact of changing the Turbo Boost parameters to see what would happen. Video playback was a bit better, but the laptop has a GTX 1060 in it, and GPU-equipped machines always use more power. When new, it got roughly two hours of battery life in normal use.

Here’s where I want to pivot and talk about my own experience with this trick.

How to enable turbo boost aw17 r2