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wardie

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 18, 2008
551
179
I tried an interesting experiment yesterday during a big Lightroom batch process which ramps up the CPU load on my i7-7700K 8 virtual cores with hyper threading, normally causing the fan to become noisy and max out at 2700rpm.

I just switched off the turbo boost. This had the effect of maintaining an ongoing much quieter operation with the fan at between 1200-1800rpm whilst still loading the cores 100%. CPU temp dropped a bit to around 90-93C.

As I’m not doing it for the money and don’t actually care about every last second (who really does?) then actually a 5% hit on processing time was reasonable to me for the sake of a much quieter machine I could sit at and still use to surf in parallel without it sounding like a jet engine. Core temp was still just over 90C which isn’t exactly cold but within its limit (maybe not to some people’s tastes, in which case get a different chip).

On = 4.4 GHz 97-98C fan 2700rpm
Off = 4.2 GHz. 90-93C fan 1200-1800rpm
Tools = iStat, Intel Power Gadget, Turbo Boost Switcher (free version)
 
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Since Photoshop and Lightroom can bring the most robust computers to their knees, I think you found a good solution.

Do you have an SSD or Fusion drive? How much RAM are you packing?
 
Since Photoshop and Lightroom can bring the most robust computers to their knees, I think you found a good solution.

Do you have an SSD or Fusion drive? How much RAM are you packing?

1TB factory internal SSD (O/S plus some Lightroom classic CC catalogue & masters for working on), plus a USB3 HDD on the side for bigger media. 24GB RAM = 8 GB original Apple + 16GB upgraded.
 
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