Question about boost clock or base clock

[djd3]

Is it better to have a high base clock ?

Or 

Is it better to turbo up to a higher speed when needed ? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Normally clock doesn't matter that much, cpu performance does. Look at reviews of the cpus in programs you use. 

 

Normally there is a "all core turbo" that a cpu will sit at during normal loads. This depends on many things like cooling and power limits, and is often not on labels.

[ArrowThief]

This 100% depends on your workload, your cooling, and your power delivery.

 

Constant workloads such as rendering, will often not be able to sustain boost clocks for long periods. You can make it boost longer by having lots of cooling and power headroom.
Gaming on the other hand is far more variable. The sudden short boosts in performance can be very useful to keep a stable frame rate. 

 

Also boost clocks are often designed to only be applied to one or two cores at a time, so again good for gaming, bad for rendering. 

[djd3]

28 minutes ago, ArrowThief said:

This 100% depends on your workload, your cooling, and your power delivery.

 

Constant workloads such as rendering, will often not be able to sustain boost clocks for long periods. You can make it boost longer by having lots of cooling and power headroom.
Gaming on the other hand is far more variable. The sudden short boosts in performance can be very useful to keep a stable frame rate. 

 

Also boost clocks are often designed to only be applied to one or two cores at a time, so again good for gaming, bad for rendering. 

So then what's the reason to overclock your base clock? Especially since in most cases you disable the boosting in order to get a higher core clock?

[ZzLy]

37 minutes ago, djd3 said:

Is it better to have a high base clock ?

Or 

Is it better to turbo up to a higher speed when needed ? 

Base clock is irrelevant, you should be paying attention to the boost clock. The CPU constantly changes it's speed according to the load, and it will even drop under the base clock under very light usage, so really the base clock is a useless figure.

[ArrowThief]

@djd3

Thats a slightly sad and slightly cool question. There has been less and less overclocking headroom as boost clocks have gotten better. This means that they are tuned better to produce the best performance out of the box, which is cool. But it sad because it also means that the joy of getting really significant performance enhancements from overclocking is going away. 

 

All of that said, you can still get some performance beyond the boost clocks (most of the time) But that requires lots of cooling and power headroom. 
I guess to simplify my previous post. 
Pay attention to the boost clock if you have the cooling to make it a constant. Pay attention to the base if you don't have the cooling to keep it going. (or power but usually cooling) 

 

Side note: Its been quite some time since I heard this, but I believe Intel only boosts for a specific amount of time. After that it drops to base. I could be wrong about that and that may be a "feature" that can be disabled even if I am right. An overclock will stay consistent as long as the system stays stable.