I had my new i7-3770 on an Asus P8Z77M-Pro motherboard set up and running for the Primegrid SR5 challenge ... and then noticed something rather sad. My Pentium G850 was completing individual work-units quicker and overall my Core2Quad Q8200 was doing more work per hour. The Xeon E31220 (with a similar benchmark) was doing around 3 times the amount of work per hour.
I started disabling all the 'smart-step' settings in the BIOS and even re-flashed to the latest version. The problem persisted, so I checked the OS and couldn't find any scaling. The CPU temperature showed around 58'C and I couldn’t find any stray processes that were hogging the CPU.
As a last resort, I disabled Hyper-threading in the BIOS and suddenly CPU temps kick up to around 65'C and it burns through a work-unit about 10% quicker than the Xeon.
At this stage, I am assuming that the CPU knocks its own frequency down when all the threads are being used?? Whatever the cause, it is going to be a 4-core machine from now on!
I finished in position 199 for this challenge, which isn't too bad
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