[siddhant09]

Yes, and which is why most benchmarks today are somewhat misleading as well.

My personal laptop's CPU is Intel i7-9750H. I always run it with turbo boost disabled for predictable, sustained performance. Turbo boost is weird as in it can lead to a sub-par user experience (lag) when your processor throttles.

Interestingly enough I can simultaneously compile a ~250k LOC purescript project & attend a google meets call with TB disabled but not with it enabled. (This is on MBP-16)

[magila]

The OS is doing something screwy if frequency scaling causes noticeable performance regression. A modern Intel CPU like the 9750H supports very low latency (on the order of microseconds) hardware driven frequency scaling which should pretty much always perform better than leaving the CPU locked at the base frequency.

Intel Macbooks are also notoriously thermally limited so I wonder if the settings you're using are just causing the CPU to run hotter than it would at stock.

[hnuser123456]

I have a thin gaming laptop with the same CPU, and stock settings let it climb to 100C and then figure out how fast it can run without getting hotter, usually also with far too much voltage. Decreasing the voltage, and even power limit, and disabling boost, lets you set that temp ceiling to something closer to 60-80C, which will make the CPU more comfortable running at higher frequencies, although with a theoretically slightly reduced stability margin due to less voltage overhead. However, long-term use at high temps and voltage can also degrade stability, so it's a delicate balancing act. The only way to guarantee sustained performance at low temps is to improve cooling, with higher fan speeds or a laptop cooler.

[gruez]

>My personal laptop's CPU is Intel i7-9750H. I always run it with turbo boost disabled for predictable, sustained performance. Turbo boost is weird as in it can lead to a sub-par user experience (lag) when your processor throttles.

Does your laptop have such atrocious cooling that it can't sustain frequencies higher than base? When my laptop undergoes thermal throttling (ie. hits 95C), the frequency is still above the base frequency, so I'm still getting more performance than if turbo was disabled.

edit: tested with cinebench. On my laptop with intel cpu the sustained all-core turbo frequency is 45% higher than the base frequency. This is with throttlestop enabled, otherwise TDP/tau throttling kicks in first rather than thermal throttling.

[siddhant09]

It's a MSI-GF65 Thin which has excellent cooling. However with TB enabled both Ubuntu & Windows randomly starts a process (usually updates) which hits the CPU hard and consequently all the fans spin up.

At base clock, I see no visible loss in performance and a much quieter workstation.

The performance loss in compilation is offset by continuously compiling (watch) which I can do with TB disabled but not with TB enabled.

For gaming, I limit the turbo boost to 3.2Ghz and get a more consistent performance with no sudden drops.

[user_7832]

Wouldn’t this be due to thermal throttling? In which case a better heat dissipation system would help avoid it.

[siddhant09]

Not really. Intel tries to push the thermal envelop as much as it can for as long as it can. While the CPU is rated at 45W, TB actually pushes it to 70W+ for short intervals.

On Windows, instead of disabling TB, I just limit the CPU TDP at 40W via throttle-stop.

TB just makes the laptop loud and hot even when the added performance is not required.

[genewitch]

As a reference, my laptop is a Ryzen 4800H and I only hear the fans... Well, never. I even have the laptop set to "agressive cooling" which turns an LED red indicating I am not being green.

I was using the laptop to mine verium during this past winter in the US south to keep my hands and arms warm in lieu of running HVAC more. I never bothered to switch it back to normal or "quiet" mode.

I take my first statement back, running blender benchmarks or some other benchmark that tries to tap out the GPU tends to make a bit of noise, but normal gaming and stuff like handbrake or whatever I can't hear anything.

[rambojazz]

Why turbo boost disabled instead of always-enabled?