Overclocking Nehalem "almost as good as gaving a 2nd graphics card" - Intel

From Tom's Hardware: Turbo mode will dynamically alter the speeds of the four cores once the processor gets out of a thermal envelope. Dunford and Piednoel told reporters that the BIOS menus will have a menu to select thermal dissipation (TDP) numbers. If you have a really good heatsink, you could crank this number to 190 watts. Conversely, an average heatsink would warrant a rating of 140 watts or below. Once the processor detects that it’s going out of this envelope, it will start clocking itself up/down. The processor will also try to move poorly threaded applications to few cores.

The Turbo Boost throttling could obviously vary benchmarking results and Piednoel said someone testing the chip in Singapore versus a cooler environment will probably see a difference in speeds. Thankfully, the throttling only takes place when the processor is out of the thermal envelope and Piednoel promised that Turbo Boost can even be turned off in BIOS.

Since many games are single threaded, the turbo mode will actually give perhaps a 10% increase in potential frames per second. Of course there’s a big difference between potential and actual frame rates and Piednoel said we can expect "single digit" gains for most games. Multithreaded games like Lost Planet and benchmarks like 3D Mark Vantage should see a dramatic difference from the 8 threaded Nehalem and Turbo Boost.

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