What we’re demonstrating today is the impact of multi-core enhancement – a feature present on both AMD and Intel boards – and how the feature can cause confusion in the user base. When more threads are engaged, the boost is lower (in compliance with stability and lower voltage). With lower thread engagement applications, depending on if it’s Ryzen or Threadripper, AMD can add an additional +100MHz to +200MHz to the boosted speed.

AMD employs XFR on Ryzen onward, or Extended Frequency Range, and leverages its boosting also on a per-thread level. Intel and AMD both do something similar to the above: With the 8700K, Intel uses Turbo Boost with different frequencies as dependent on thread engagement, where single-core utilization boosts the highest (4.7GHz) and six-core utilization boosts the lowest (4.3GHz, over 3.7GHz base). Stock Intel Turbo Boost Behavior on Coffee Lake Enabling multi-core enhancement means that the CPU ignores the Intel spec, instead locking all-core Turbo to the single-core Turbo speeds, which means a few things: (1) Higher voltage is now necessary, and therefore higher power draw and heat (2) instability can be introduced to the system, as we observed in Blender on the ASUS Maximus X Hero with multi-core enhancement on the 8700K (3) performance is bolstered in-step with higher all-core Turbo. Multi-core “enhancement” options are either enabled, disabled, or “auto” in motherboard BIOS, where “auto” has somewhat nebulous behavior, depending on board maker. This primarily sets forth to highlight what “Multi-Core Enhancement” is, and why you may want to leave it off when using a CPU without overclocking. This content piece aims to explain how Turbo Boost works on Intel’s i7-8700K, 8600K, and other Coffee Lake CPUs. Please note that this impacts Cinebench scores and POVRay scores, but not gaming scores. UPDATE: We've issued an update to our initial 8700K review, pursuant to interesting findings on the Gigabyte F2 BIOS revision.

How to enable turbo boost i7 7700