TheOverclocker Issue 39 | Page 32

bring forth this CPU to the masses. There’s a whole host of changes INTEL has undertaken that are more than skin deep. We of course won’t go into the technical detail of it all, but suffice to say there are some useful changes that make this an attractive CPU even for those who do not use it in a productivity environment, that is for gamers and just general hardware enthusiasts. This is in particular when it comes to TURBO-BOOST MAX 3.0 which is basically a new Turbo mode or state in addition to the one we are familiar with. It allows applications to be pinned or automatically run on cores that overclock the best or perhaps better put have the highest Turbo frequency capability of them all. Since each core on the CPU has been graded by INTEL, it is now possible to know which core is the best and which is the worst. Via a combination of the 32 The OverClocker Issue 39 | 2016 motherboard BIOS settings and INTEL’s own software, it is now possible to assign single threaded tasks and applications automatically to this single best performing core, which is able to overclock pas the stipulated 3.5GHZ Turbo 2.0 frequency. Depending on the application and of course the particular CPU sample. The single core could have a clock speed north of 4GHz, so the CPU doesn’t lose out on those low thread applications and current generation gaming titles. Sounds all good and well, but frankly it isn’t a worthwhile feature for enthusiasts and certainly not for overclockers. Your performance tuning and overclocking will largely remain the same and you will either set fixed clocks, or regulate the Turbo range per core manually as you’ve always done before. Speaking of per core overclocking, it is possible as well to set individual voltages for each core. It isn’t well explained in any literature we found, but at least one motherboard (no prizes for guessing it was the RAMPAGE V 10 Edition), allows you to do this, for that extra but of fine tuning your particular CPU. What INTEL has also added to the 6950X is an AVX offset. Unlike with the previous CPU family, the AVX frequency isn’t fixed or set to whatever the CPU frequency is. You can control this independently, but only in one direction and that is downwards. That is, if you for instance have a sync’d CPU multiplier of 40x, and an AVX offset of 3x. Then your AVX frequency is effectively 3700MHz (assuming a 100MHz Base Clock). This is again useful for the competitive overclocker who is looking to strike the right balance between AVX workload performance and system stability. Since AVX workloads create an inordinate amount of load on the CPU, these are likely to