Clock Frequencies

The following chart shows how well the processor sustains its clock frequency and which boost clock speeds are achieved at various thread counts. This test uses a custom-coded application that mimics real-life performance—it is not a stress test like Prime95. Modern processors change their clocking behavior depending on the type of load, which is why we provide three plots with classic floating point math, SSE SIMD code, and modern AVX vector instructions. Each of the three test runs calculates the same result using the same algorithm, just with a different CPU instruction set.



With up to two threads active the CPU runs at 4.7 GHz pretty much all the time. When fully loaded you're still getting 4.5 GHz, unless the integrated graphics draw so much power that the CPU hits its power limit earlier.


This screenshot from the BIOS confirms the clock scaling:

• 1 or 2 cores active = 4.7 GHz
• 3 or 4 cores active = 4.5 GHz

Overclocking

The Core i3-14100 has its multiplier locked (no "K" suffix). You can technically overclock the base clock (BCLK) to 102.9 MHz, but that will only give you around 3% performance gains at best. Increasing BCLK beyond that limit isn't possible because Intel includes a BCLK counter in their CPU, which will shut off the CPU at 103 MHz and above.

On 12th Gen you could overclock using an external BCLK generator on the motherboard, this is no longer possible with 13th and 14th Gen.

During BCLK overclocking I wondered why performance was lower than default. Turns out that when you overclock the BCLK beyond 100.0 MHz, the CPU will run at a x44 multiplier when fully loaded, and not at x45 as expected. Not sure if it's a bug or a feature. The solution is to manually set the multipliers to x47 (1+2 cores) and x45 (3+4 cores) in the BIOS, otherwise you'll be losing a bit of performance with BCLK overclocking.