Quote Originally Posted by Kougar View Post
Unclewebb, I'm totally loving your utilities.
You're most welcome. I was just working on a slightly different version of my i7 Turbo tool today. This one is the V8 version. It will show the calculated multiplier for each thread. After rge does some testing I'll think about releasing it. CPU-Z sometimes shows a +2 Turbo with all 4 cores enabled in the bios and I'm not sure how accurate that is. I'm hoping this new tool can be used to figure this out.

On my Q6600 it's able to show that when running a single threaded app on core 0, core 1 which is joined with core 0 has the same multi but it's two friends for core 2 and core 3 are trying to idle down. I never knew that!



The 67.9°C thermal spec that Intel released is a Tcase temperature which is a temperature measured with a probe located at the geometric center of the IHS. When running a high stress program like some Linpack testing, the theory is that as long as the Tcase stays below this temperature then a user should rarely have to worry about thermal throttling during normal operation. The core temp will approach 100C at full load when the Tcase is at this value.

This spec is designed for system builders. This allows them to design cases and select heatsinks and decide how many fans they are going to need to keep the CPU under that temperature.

Thermal throttling is all controlled by the core temperature sensors. With Core i7, they seem to start thermal throttling right at 100C. The previous Core 2 CPUs that I tested would start a couple of degrees sooner. When thermal throttling starts, that will show up in the RealTemp Thermal Status area and your multiplier will start to rapidly cycle down to 12.

Turbo throttling is different. There are a combination of factors and temperature is just one thing. I think Turbo throttling can start to happen at about 80C to 85C. I don't have enough data about this yet. There may not be an exact temperature number. It also depends on core voltage and current going through the CPU so it might depend on those two as well even when the temps are high.

i7 Turbo and RealTemp 3.30 should both show any Turbo or thermal throttling. The Calculated Multiplier should be the same in both programs now. RealTemp has been using this method since Core i7 was introduced but I recently refined it a little so it shows multiplier steps of 0.2 instead of 0.5 to make sure that it can catch any problems a little sooner.