mx11 i7 -- little confused re turbo boost

Hi all,

I tried searching the forum regarding turbo boost but I really couldn't' find the answer to my questions.

I just got the mx11 with Intel® Core™ i7 640UM (4M Cache, 1.2 GHZ with 2.266 GHz Max Turbo Frequency).

What surprised me was when I tried downloading WoW (lich king expansion), I'm told that my computer doesn't meet the requirements. I was shocked to see this considering this is a brand new computer and I've been playing WoW on my Mac since it first came out. This prompted me to take a closer look at what I actually bought and saw that the CPU is a quad processor at 1.2GHZ. I thought this meant there were 4 processors running at 1.2GHZ which would make it faster than a single processor running 1.2GHZ. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

So I took a look at overclocking my CPU and I can only go up to 1666. But when I take a look at Alienware's website, it says I can get 2.266 GHz max turbo frequency. (1) What does this mean? (2) is turbo different than overclocking the BIOS? and (3) how do I get my CPU up to 2.266?

Thanks

 

First off:


You have two cores. Each of your cores may run two threads, each.

Windows reports the number of threads (imagine each thread as a single queue being processed) as "cores"

Turbo boost means, within certain power draw and tempurature limits, your CPU will automatically overclock itself as needed.

 

I'll go into more detail on what jeremyshaw said, but he pretty much summed it up.

You do not have a quad core processor, the ULV series of Core i7s are not quad core, but dual core with hyperthreading. So they act and work LIKE 4. Each core hand handle two threads at a time, and voila, you basically have a quad core processor. (Not a true quad core i7, but much more power than a standard dual core)

Your i7's bus is 133MHZ, with a constant 9 multiplier, puts you at 1.2GHz. Overclocking in the bios just allows you to raise the FSB speed from 133 up to 166. This overclocking allows you to have up to a normal 1.5GHz.

Turboboost is a feature that basically has Windows and the BIOS overclock the chip as necessary, by just raising your multipliers when the 2 cores are in heavy load. Doing some basic math tells you that 18 multipliers instead of 9, takes your processor to 2.266 GHz.

You cannot have 2.266 full time, doesn't work that way. Read around the forums, there is a LOT of known troubles with this laptop and World Of Warcraft. (Which is why I'm glad I'm a League Of Legends guy). You probably cannot install it without white listing the installer and downloader first. Like I said, I'm a LoL guy, so I dunno, never installed it before.

Hope I helped, best of luck.

 

I seriously doubt you couldn't find any posts or even looked it up online about what i7 does, a simple google search on how does i7 work would have sufficed.

 

I see...

I like to think of myself as a Google-->NBR portal

 

That is normal since the installer just detects the base frequency of 1.2ghz. I get the same error. However I ran wow with full res all sliders up exept shadows and view distance. I get 30+fps 99% of the time.

 

Same here. I got the message saying my laptop didn't meet the requirements as well. I installed anyway and have zero problems running WoW with my i7.

 

Many thanks all I learned something new today