[SOLVED] Turbo enabled but ratio not shown in M.I.T. (BIOS)

[flatfoot]

I'm running my i7-870 at its stock 2.93GHz at the moment to wait for the newly applied Arctic Silver 5 to develop its full potential.
Just for fun I ran Geekbench and got a score ~9800 after a cold boot. when I looked through my old Geekbench scores I noticed that the very same setup at the same CPU and RAM speeds reached ~10800 a few months ago.

The only real hardware change since then was that I swapped my defective Vertex 2 SSD with an Intel 320 series – and that shouldn't make a difference at all in Geekbench, right?

What I've done so far:

• Checked BIOS settings[/*:m:34prv5cl]
• Tried a different smbios.plist files (iMac11,2; MacPro3,1; MacPro4,1)[/*:m:34prv5cl]
• Removed enabling C-/P-states from apple.boot.plist[/*:m:34prv5cl]

No difference whatsoever and I'm stumped as to where these 1000 points have gone. And it's not just the points; HandBrake really seems to be a bit slower, too. So it's about real performance, not just some synthetic benchmarks.

Any advise would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Nanker/Phelge]

Re: Geekbench score dropped by 1000 points – Any ideas why?

Maybe try MacPro3,1? I had a stock i7 870 @ 2.93 on a P55A on that SMBIOS and was pulling > 10K on 64bit Geekbench.

 

[flatfoot]

Re: Geekbench score dropped by 1000 points – Any ideas why?

Thanks, I'll try that tomorrow. But as I said, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the Mac Pro 4,1 smbios since I get the same low scores with the iMac 11,1 smbios, with which I got ~10800 a few months back.

 

[flatfoot]

Re: Geekbench score dropped by 1000 points – Any ideas why?

No dice.

If anyone has any more ideas, please let me know.

 

[netsullivc]

Re: Geekbench score dropped by 1000 points – Any ideas why?

Did you up grade to lion in the intervening time? Its seems to slow things down a bit.

 

[flatfoot]

Re: Geekbench score dropped by 1000 points – Any ideas why?

Nope, still on 10.6.8.

 

[flatfoot]

Re: Geekbench score dropped by 1000 points – Any ideas why?

Just noticed another strange thing:

Shouldn't "Turbo Ratio" be 24 for an i7-870?!

Before you ask: Yes, Turbo Boost is enabled.
And when the system POSTs, it shows a CPU clock speed of 3.2GHz (24x 133)

What's going on here?

 

[flatfoot]

Re: Turbo ratio not shown in M.I.T. (BIOS) despite being enabled

Just edited the thread title according to my latest findings concerning the problem (see last thread).

Please help, I'm at a total loss here...

 

[flatfoot]

Re: Turbo ratio not shown in M.I.T. (BIOS) despite being enabled

Turns out my mobo was dying.

The day before yesterday my hack wouldn't boot anymore. After making sure it wasn't the PSU or graphics card, I disassembled everything and found that there must have been a short-circuit between two of the CPU socket pins.

I was afraid that the mobo might have taken down the i7-870 with it, got a new board (gonna RMA the old one and hope for the best), assembled everything and everything's back to normal, i. e. turbo ratios shown in M.I.T. and Geekbench back to ~10800 rather than ~9800.