“Apple has been bundling its Mac computers with Intel processors for a while now, which means the chip-maker’s Turbo Boost technology can be found in supported Mac models,” Zayed Rehman writes for Redmond Pie. “However, Apple gives you no real control over it, which essentially means you cannot turn it on or off at will. OS X does it all automatically.”
“If you think your Mac’s fan noise is loud and if it’s generally heating up without much reason, it could be because of Turbo Boost which is at play. In this case, you may want to manually disable it for some time to see if it helps cool it down. Disabling Turbo Boost can also help increase battery life by 25%,” Rehman writes. “So if you are on the road and want an extended period of battery time out of your MacBook, disabling Turbo Boost might help you get more work done while on the go.”
Rehman writes, “Before you begin to manually enable or disable Turbo Boost on your Mac, it is important to check if the machine in question supports Turbo Boost.”
How to enable or disable Turbo Boost on your Mac here.
Interesting & potentially desirable app. The link in the full article doesn’t work, but searching produced http://www.rugarciap.com/turbo-boost-switcher-for-os-x/
which is the author’s website. I installed the app & it seems to be working as described.
Mostly it’s not turbo boost that’s at fault for consuming too much energy – bad software is. Mac OS X does a fantastic job of handling energy, but it can’t do anything against bad software.
What if I always want it on? 😊
Many Intel CPUs support a Turbo mode, but it isn’t switched on or off, the speed changes dynamically as the load changes and if you’re not doing anything CPU intensive, this software isn’t really necessary.
Google Intel Power Gadget and download it. Run it while you’re going through your normal routine and you’ll see that your Mac’s clock speed is highly variable. My Mac has a 4980HQ Haswell that is nominally rated at 2.8 GHz with a maximum turbo speed of 4.0 GHz. I strongly doubt I’ll ever see 4.0 GHz since it can only do that when running on a single core. Usually the CPU runs well under the nominal 2.8 and hovers around 900 MHz while idling, roughly 1.7ish while streaming from Hulu or playing a locally stored HD file or about 2.8 while watching HD on Netflix. The only times I really see the clock speed go up is during game play, transcoding video, etc.
Turbo Boost Switcher can be useful at times, but Intel Power Gadget is very visual and has a nice logging feature that’ll give you a nice record of how you’re treating your CPU and what activities and software draw the most power.
The more tools, the merrier!
It does not seem like this app is useful, it seems to be solving a problem that does not exist. Turbo Boost control is very good now, its used to allow single threaded operations to run on one CPU at higher speed while the other CPUs are idle. Turbo Boost actually lowers the clock speed when all CPU cores are engaged and heavily loaded. This si to keep the CPUs within Intel’s thermal design window and still give excellent performance. Turning Turbo Boost off simply means the system runs slower or that more cores will have to get engaged to process the same job. The fans are suppose to come on to maintain safe operating temperatures, if the temps get too high then the CPU speeds are automatically brought down to more tolerable levels. If you’re worried about fan speeds or hot CPUs then don’t run Photoshop or any other high demand application.