How did my cpu's boost/overclock themselves?

Hardware CPU
1

So I was looking back at my old passmark cpu scores from last year trying to reproduce them.

I somehow scored a 13,700 last year , but when I benchmark again today I get an average of 12,000 even.

I can see that my last year score the cpu's measured speed was reading 3.60ghz. While this year the measured speed is 3.2 ghz which is the stock clock for a x5679. Now with dual socket 1366 boards there are no overclocking options so how did my cpu's back then boost up to or overclock themselves to 3.6ghz?

I checked and made sure the priority was set to high and I watched the cpu's speed rating in cpu-z and it seems as if they are boosting up to 3.5ghz during the test but they then downclock to 1.5ghz between the tests. which gives worse results as the tests then have to run for a second or two at 1.5ghz before they boost back up to 3.5ghz.

How do i get the cpu's back to where they were last year reading 3.6ghz and being several percentage faster?

2

I should also say I checked into if the cpu's might be running hot and no they are under 60c even at 100% load

3

3.6 GHz is the Turbo frequency of the X5679, 3.2 GHz is the base. Sounds like they were turboing last time and now they are not.

4

They do seem to turbo to 3.5ghz according to cpu-z during the test. in between tests they don't stay at turbo clock speeds and dip way down to 1.5 which I think is hurting the score.

But they are SEEN by passmark still as 3.2 ghz cpu's. When last year they were seen as 3.6 which leads me to belive that when the initial scan was done by passmark they were already boosting before the test.

So is there a way to lock them at boost speeds?

5

I have been looking into C states myself, it's related to the turbo stuff.
I don't even come close to knowing enough to help, There was a program for amd cpu's called AmdMsrtweaker. I would check the overclocking forums
Wish I could help more

6

If your using windows, you can just switch to the high performance power plan in the control panel. If not (or if your on windows and want to muck around in the bios anyway) just going into the bios and disable all of the power saving stuff. They probably won't sit at the 3.5ghz constantly, but they'll sit at base clock (3.2ghz), or at a turbo state. Cpus clock differently depending on how many threads are in use, so for example my Xeon 1231v3 will sit at 3.8ghz if one or two threads are in use, but will clock to 3.6ghz if more than a couple threads are in use.

7

ok i went into the bios and disabled all c states but did not disable boost tech. I also changed the minimum processor state to 100% which seems to have locked the cpu's at boost clocks of 3.45ghz

This however has not changed the passmark scores and also hasn't changed passmark identifying the cpu's as 3.2ghz.