Questions about overclocked cpu chart

[kadja]

Hello,

I have been a user of passmark for many years. I have watched the website and available data grow as well.

I was really excited to discover that an overclocked cpu chart was available, but looking closer at the chart there are quite a few odd things about it.

Using the chart there is no individual reference to the dataset of overclocked cpus, unlike the general dataset that the rest of the website shares.

I noticed a discrepancy between the 10900k stock chart benchmarks, and the 10900k overclocked benchmarks, where the value between the stock and overclocked should definitely be greater in my opinion.

I also noticed that because no data is available to view, that single threaded overclocked benchmarks are also not available.

The html links in the chart link to the original un-overclocked data sets.

Also, users are unable to order the price for performance chart by greatest to least. The chart presents the data with the highest passmark score, and then displays the price for performance as bars (which is a nice way to show that data), but it makes filtering the data with the chart not an option.

I would be thrilled to share that this chart is available, but in its current iteration, not only am I uncertain as to the quality of the data, but I am really only able to share the multi-threaded passmark score when comparing overclocked cpus.

Because of the discrepancy with the 10900k benchmark score, it also makes we wonder about how the data is being collected, are users able to determine that they have or have not overclocked a particular cpu?

If indeed this is a proper set of data about overclocked cpus, I had also thought that the mega cpu list would have been enabled with an option that filtered by overclock.

I appreciate all the time and effort over the years that have been put into the passmark software, it has been an invaluable tool for me to learn about the central processing unit, and also to facilitate information about central processing units (and gpus, and more recently ssds(although we won't get into the mess those charts are!)). I definitely appreciate all the work that has been done.

#oldwebsitelayoutwasbetterkappa

Thank You!

P.S. If you guys are ever in need of a quality assurance or U.I. layout tester or just someone to work with the 'other side' of the user experience for the Passmark website, I am definitely available!

Thanks again!

[David (PassMark)]

Overclocking was a lot more clear cut years ago. CPUs had single clock speed, and it was obvious if the CPU was running faster.
Then more and more layers of thermal management and power control were added. Then single core turbo was added. Then multi-core turbo. So the advertised / marketing clock speed doesn't really indicate the speed that the CPU runs at most of the time anymore. So looking at the CPUs current clock speed wouldn't tell you anymore if the CPU was overlocked or not. You can also have cases where you have a single core overclock, but multi-core running at stock speeds.

More recently things got even more complex. We have things like "Intel Turbo Boost Technology 2.0" and "Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0" and "Intel Thermal Velocity Boost Technology". And on the marketing side Intel are using phrases like, "up to 5.3 GHz" for the clock speed, rather than giving a particular fixed number for the maximum clock. CPUs are basically automatically overlocking themselves slightly when thermals allow for it nowadays.

The internal details for all this are largely keep secret by Intel. Meaning the allowed clock speeds can't just be read from the CPU itself, this would typically be done via MSR registers, but these MSR details are different for each CPU family and secret.

There is also the case where a CPU is overclocked in theory, but in practice the boosting is limited by thermals. i.e. it might perform no better than a stock CPU. So even reading the MSR values doesn't actually tell you if the CPU is overlocked when running.

What this mess means is that it is hard to know if a CPU is overlocked or not anymore. As a result the value of the overclocked chart isn't as good as it once was.