HT and Turbo Boost benefits

Before heading to the conclusion, one last thing remains to be checked out and that's the performance benefits of Hyper Threading and Turbo Boost technology implemented in Core i5 661. While Hyper Threading enables two threads workload per physical processor core, Turbo Boost increases frequencies of one or both cores when possible. These two implementations in tandem enable a Dual Core i5 661 to produce performance comparable to some Quad Core processors, depending on conditions and benchmarks. So how does it work? When and how much performance boost do you get thanks to these technologies?

I ran several tests with different settings on Core i5 661 and compared them to default settings where both Turbo Boost and HT are enabled. First just Turbo Boost was disabled, then just Hyper Threading and lastly both Turbo Boost and HT were disabled. After comparing all of the results it becomes clear that the biggest performance gains come from Hyper Threading, and Turbo Boost has a minor effect in most of the benchmarks. It does have some effect in single threaded tests, but not as much as HT boosts performance in multithreaded tests, with or without Turbo Boost.
Disabling these functions will bring you some power savings, lower temps and maybe some extra MHz when overclocking, but it's not worth it. Hyper- Threading in most cases works like a charm and really does help Core i5 661 keep up with the competition, and Turbo Boost adds some performance on top of that so there's no reason to disable it.

wPrime and SuperPI

Audio encoding

Video encoding and rendering

WinRAR archive ~1GB

Gaming

Power Consumption