A question regarding Lynnfield CPU Turbo Mode

From Anandtech: How Turbo Mode Works

In the simplest terms: The i5 and i7 can turn off unneeded cores, and dynamically overclock the one(s) it they *are* using by a couple bins. The limits are dictated by power consumption and cooling.

So would there be any benefit to manually overclocking Lynnfield CPUs? Based on the Anandtech article, it seems as if the PCU takes care of the overclocking for you.

If you run a fully multi-threaded application then Turbo won't show its benefits as it can't shut down unneeded cores.

It will show some benefit - turbo can overclock a bit with all cores running if you're under TDP and thermal limits. Manual overclocking will give more gains though, since you are not constrained to the normal TDP of the CPU.

Ok, so you gain one speed bin. It's hardly more than the overclock some motherboards applied to Core 2 chips by default (abit boards often ran at 272FSB).

Are many applications fully multi-threaded or just a few handful of them?

Depends what tasks you do with the computer. Video encoding, 3D rendering etc is usually well threaded. Other tasks like games often aren't (although that is slowly changing).

the difference between turbo mode and standard overclocking is that turbo mode kicks in when its needed on the fly, whereas with normal computing and standard oc'ing you run at whatever speed and if you do too much, your system gets slower.

intel tried similar things years ago and it was a complete failure. looks like they got it right this time. the dynamic ability to determine how many cores are needed, shut down unneeded cors, and supply more and more voltage to the cores that have the workload is nothing short of genius.

..and yes, you can still o'clock AND run turbo mode effectively. and if you get a i7 lynnfield you can even do other magic stuff like simulate twice as many cores as you have (virtualization), enhanced speedstep, hyper threading,...

In that case, the i7 860 is overall a better CPU than the i5 750 for a computer that is used for video/audio editing and creation, photoshop, gaming, and multi-tasking?

The fact that it has hyperthreading makes it better for all those tasks, regardless of everything else.

I see, thank you everyone for all your input ^_^