What should I believe?

[Diggs]

I'm used to Task Manger showing slightly higher than rated CPU speeds at peak times. Usually just a couple of tenths of a GHz. Below is a screenshot of a stock Dell Inspiron i7 (no over-clocking) I have that is running almost 40% above max rating when the chart shows it to be idle. I've seen Task Manager be wrong before but it usually goes bonkers and shows stupid numbers not something reasonable like this. I'm trying to figure out what is going on here. Not that it really matters. It's just one of those things that makes the geek in me go hmmmm.......

 

[britechguy]

I thought this was one of those processors with "turbo boost" that allows brief spikes well above the usual frequency, and it is.

See: https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Core_i7/Intel-Core i7 i7-8700.html

The number you're seeing is within normal limits for the turbo boost mode.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Better to go direct to the source, Intel ARK pages: https://www.intel.com/content/www/u...-12m-cache-up-to-4-60-ghz/specifications.html

Max Turbo Frequency for that CPU is 4.6ghz, so you can potentially see that speed climb to that point without any overclocking.

But yeah, this is all normal and you're going to see even wider gaps between base clock and max clock on younger CPUs than this. You must always look up the CPU itself to know what it can do.

Task Manager isn't lying to you. It's accurate!

 

[Diggs]

Cool! Learned something new today!

 

[Porthos]