Stock Intel Turbo Boost Behavior on Coffee Lake Enabling multi-core enhancement means that the CPU ignores the Intel spec, instead locking all-core Turbo to the single-core Turbo speeds, which means a few things: (1) Higher voltage is now necessary, and therefore higher power draw and heat (2) instability can be introduced to the system, as we observed in Blender on the ASUS Maximus X Hero with multi-core enhancement on the 8700K (3) performance is bolstered in-step with higher all-core Turbo.

Multi-core “enhancement” options are either enabled, disabled, or “auto” in motherboard BIOS, where “auto” has somewhat nebulous behavior, depending on board maker. This primarily sets forth to highlight what “Multi-Core Enhancement” is, and why you may want to leave it off when using a CPU without overclocking. This content piece aims to explain how Turbo Boost works on Intel’s i7-8700K, 8600K, and other Coffee Lake CPUs. Please note that this impacts Cinebench scores and POVRay scores, but not gaming scores. UPDATE: We've issued an update to our initial 8700K review, pursuant to interesting findings on the Gigabyte F2 BIOS revision.

How to enable turbo boost i7 6700