Overclocking i7 860 and Easy Tune

[Lerxst]

I checked my system performance at stock settings and got a geekbench 64 bit score of around 9400. Then I booted into Windows 7..ran Easy Tune ( The Gigabyte tool that provides a quick method of overclocking). I upped my speed to 2.91 Ghz..booted back into Snow Leopard and Ran Geekbench again. This time the score was 9831.

I repeated the process but this time boosted the Easy Tune Settings to 3.15 GHZ (It also boosted the ram speed to 1200MHZ.

I booted back into 10.6.4 and reran geekbench. This time my score was 4573. Wow!!.. Why the drop off and what changed between 2.91 and 3.15 ? ≈

Processor temps look low but performance in both geekbench and cinebench took big hits.

What am I missing?

 

[thgill]

If you are booting into OS X with a 32 bit kernel you can run MSR tools and see what speed the cpu is actually running at and if speedstep is working correctly.


Most likely you need to boot into the bios and go into CPU advanced options and make sure the options are set to Enabled rather than Auto. There should be like 6 options under there, Turbo Boost, Hyper Threading and etc.

OS X handles that Auto designation kinda funny once you start OC'ing. Set them to enabled and you should be good to go.


I am willing to bet OS X isn't speed stepping your CPU up past the minimum multiplier thats why your Geekbench and general system performance is so slow. I ran into the same issue as did others.

 

[Lerxst]

I am willing to bet OS X isn't speed stepping your CPU up past the minimum multiplier thats why your Geekbench and general system performance is so slow. I ran into the same issue as did others.

That did the trick...

Running at 3.15 Ghz and temps are still 28C at idle.
55C at Cinebench load. Dropped off nicely back to 28C.

Geekbench 64 bit score over 11460.

Cinebench Open GL 37.15 fps
Cinebench CPU 5.65

Thanks for the help.