CPU 101 -- Frequency Vs. Boost

Greetings,

I own an Asus VivoMini PC that's over 3 years old. I'm in the mood to eBay it and get something similar that is faster with more RAM. CPU Monkey says I have this --



As I shop around these days in the lands of Intel and AMD I'm discovering 3Ghz frequency speeds are not common. That is to say the Boost speeds are growing but the 'base' speeds can be lower than that. Here's a Ryzen 7 example --



Does anyone know the deal with the base frequency? Is it as simple as the higher it is the faster the PC will do basic things? Or is there a notion that better motherboards can have a slower frequency but be more efficient these days?

I'm not a gamer and I sense that's where the turbo shines. Is that what turbo is or can it make normal things (opening apps, surfing) faster too?

I fear I could make a purchase and not increase speed in the slightest, which would then make such a purchase silly.

Newer CPU generations are trending toward more cores rather than purely on base clock speed.

6 cores is in the mid to upper mid range desktop now, and 8 cores is quite common. 5 years ago, 4 cores was upper mid range.

Whether you would benefit from 8 cores at 2.5 ghz rather than 4 cores at 3.7 is another story.............depending on what specific tasks you do on a computer. If your tasks strongly emphasize single thread performance, maybe you'd be better off with 4 cores at 3.7.

For the typical stuff like looking at this forum, you wouldn't notice the difference.

It's complicated.............you can search benchmarks that attempt to tell you how well a certain processor will perform on a certain bag of tasks, but none of the benchmarks would exactly match your workloads.

I'd certainly try to avoid spinning drives if at all possible.

A look at the Passmark benchmark site might give you some clues.

AMD vs Intel is another wrench in the works as they don't necessarily accomplish the same thing per clock cycle.

ignatzatsonic said:

I'd certainly try to avoid spinning drives if at all possible.

You could give me a $3000 PC and it if was running spinning drives I'd hand it right back.



Thanks for your thoughts. It's like the more you know on this subject... the less you know. I started picking up that Amazon will sometimes list the Boost speed instead of the base and say 'Up to 4Ghz...' where I'd rather know 'up from what?'.