Performance Features and Overclocking

In this section, we examine the performance features and overclocking potential of the Core i5-750. As i mentioned earlier, none of the Core i5-700 seres parts will support hyper-threading. However, they do have the advantage of Intel's revised Turbo Boost Technology. Turbo Boost is enabled by default and was used in all of our benchmarking so far. However, I ran a few of benchmarks without it to illustrate the its effect on performance. You'll find those results below.

I also decided to test how for I could push the Core i5-750 manually. If you go this route, one of the first decisions you'll have to make is whether to enable or disabled Turbo Boost. With it enabled, every change to the base clock will increase the turbo frequency. As you can see above, I was able to increase the bus speed to 180 MHz for a base clock speed of 3.6 GHz and a maximum turbo clock speed of 4.32 GHz. Needless to say, that's a great result. However, turbo boost actually limited the overclock of the base clock speed. If you disable it, you lose the higher turbo clock speed, but should be able to increase the base clock speed of all four cores a bit more. For the purposes of this review, though, I kept Turbo Boost enabled.

In the EVEREST integer benchmarks, turbo boost has a slight, but significant impact, particularly in the Queen test. Of course, the overclocked Core i5-750 has a massive lead over both.

Moving on to Crysis, we find that turbo boost again has a significant effect, at least at the lower resolution and settings. And once again, the overclocked result is simply phenomenal. However, no increase to clock speed can remove the limitation of our Radeon HD 4850, as demonstrated in the last two tests.

Finally, in CINEBENCH we see how turbo boost varies with threading. In the single threaded benchmark, enabling turbo boost amounts to a 14.8% increase in performance. However, in the multi-threaded benchmark the maximum turbo boost multiplier is decreased and turbo boost results in only a 5.7% increase. The only thing left to do is overclock the i5-750 manually by increasing the bus speed, which clearly results in the highest scores--but at the expensive of power, heat, and hardware longevity.

<< Previous Page - Next Page >>