Performance in Nominal Mode and during Overclocking

We have already discussed Intel Turbo Boost technology many times and said that it can adjust the Lynnfield processors’ clock frequency multiplier within a very wide range. In fact, we can say that our Intel Core i7-860 CPU never really works with its nominal multiplier of 21x. when only one processor core is utilized, its multiplier may increase up to 26x, when all cores are loaded equally, the multiplier increases only to 22x and in idle mode drops to 9x. However, when our CPU worked with Biostar TPower I55 mainboard, we did notice a few differences. If the Vdroop protection is off and it is disabled by default, the multiplier doesn’t increase under heavy load and remains at the nominal 21x.

I don’t know which behavior pattern should be considered correct, maybe we have to test our Intel processor in an Intel mainboard first. However, it is obvious that under heavy operational load our CPU working in Biostar TPower I55 mainboard in the nominal mode will run slower than on other mainboards. Let’s compare the performance of two systems built around Biostar TPower I55 and Asus P7P55D Deluxe mainboards to get a better idea of the performance differences. We chose the Asus board, because it plays fairly, just like Biostar solution, and doesn’t increase the base clock like Gigabyte and especially ASRock.

The average lagging between Biostar TPower I55 and Asus P7P55D Deluxe is about 2 %. Performance difference is maximal and reaches 5% in heavy applications loading processors seriously, like Cinebench and Fritz. However, we see Biostar TPower I55 falling behind even in SuperPi. So, it looks like the CPU doesn’t often work with 26x multiplier on Biostar TPower I55 mainboard either, does it? But things change when we enable Vdroop protection. In this case, the CPU on Biostar mainboard works just like it would on any other board. We don’t need to enable Vdroop protection in nominal mode, that is why let’s only check out the results obtained during CPU overclocking. This time Biostar TPower I55 will compete against ASRock P55 Deluxe, since both these mainboards allowed overclocking our processor to the same 3.9 GHz:

As you see, both systems perform almost equally fast. The only noticeable difference is in the multi-threaded Custom PC Bench 2007 test. It is hard to say what caused it. The test archives some data during simultaneous video playback. The results could be affected by different HDD modes set by each of the boards, or it is simply a measuring error from the benchmark. However, almost identical results obtained in all other tests indicate clearly that Biostar TPower I55 mainboard performs just as good as other mainboard.