Another Look At Intel's Lynnfield Linux Performance

[justapost]

justapost, what sort of cooling are you using? Curious about this turbo thing with the stock cooler in a closed case. Intel sending out monster coolers in the review kits is kind of questionable too, says to me "hey our stock cooling is crap, you'll have to buy something better if you want results like you see here".

I use the stock cooler but the board is not yet in a case. I just received an corsair h50 water cooling kit and plan to run those benches whom benefit from turbo again for comparison.

[sabby]

Why does it have to be BIOS-controlled? Give us back the Turbo button or at least bring back the tacky LCD MHz readouts

Had to reply since I got such a chuckle thinking about it... Funny that we went back from a nice push button/lcd combo to bios control. They should remember since it was with their cpu, perhaps the engineer weren't around in the push button days

[Ant P.]

Why does it have to be BIOS-controlled? Give us back the Turbo button or at least bring back the tacky LCD MHz readouts

[lem79]

Kano that's not right for Lynnfield. There's this table on Anandtech detailing Lynnfield's turbo modes.

[sabby]

Thats easy, only with good cooling and 2 cores in sleep mode the max turbo is activated. Apps which are accellerated with turbo mode use 1 core only in most cases. I don't know if there are apps with 2 threads hardcoded.

That's not my understanding of what I have read from the reviews. Turbo mode can be enabled anywhere from 1-4 core active, table being below for the i750 (stock/4/3/2/1)

2.66GHz 2.80GHz 2.80GHz 3.20GHz 3.20GHz

So it should never happen to have benchmark that produce double performance improvement from just having turbo enabled since from stock to the maximum turbo scaling possible is about 30% increase in clock speed.

[Kano]

Thats easy, only with good cooling and 2 cores in sleep mode the max turbo is activated. Apps which are accellerated with turbo mode use 1 core only in most cases. I don't know if there are apps with 2 threads hardcoded.

[sabby]

Benchmark result oddities

Does anybody else find it extremely strange that a few benchmark shows about double performance improvement from enabling turbo mode which is at most ~30% increase in clock speed (nas, lame, john the ripper md5)?

[lem79]

justapost, what sort of cooling are you using? Curious about this turbo thing with the stock cooler in a closed case. Intel sending out monster coolers in the review kits is kind of questionable too, says to me "hey our stock cooling is crap, you'll have to buy something better if you want results like you see here".

[justapost]

Hmm their apache benchmark results are much lower than mine, can it be that ext4 is slower than ext3 here? Or is it the Intels SSD beeing lower than the OCZ vertex?
Also their stream results are lower, i used DDR3 1333 CL7 dunno what intel used.
Their EIST and Turbo off results are all much lower than mine, as if they ran at sub 2.66GHz.
Beside that turbo on results look valid.

http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/?k=profile&u=justapost-24176-4674-30777

[Kano]

i5 and i7-8xx is for dual channel boards (currently only P55) and i7-9xx is for triple channel boards (X58). i5 has got no HT while i7 has it.