Windows 10 Users Turbo Boost and C States in 2021

[DontLetMeDrown]

Hi Everyone,

I built a new i9 10900K build about 2 weeks ago and I've been doing a ton of testing. Normally my first thing to do with a new build is go to the Avid site and do the optimizations and the processor affinity tweak.

https://avid.secure.force.com/pkb/ar...kb%2Farticle_1

https://avid.secure.force.com/pkb/ar...finity-Windows

From my experience with this build, it seems the Windows Optimization page might be a bit outdated for 2021. I used those settings for about a week with great results. Great with overclocking, and also with no overclocking.

The new mobo is a Gigabyte Aorus Elite AC- it makes it so easy to save presets, I decided to give it a shot at the default recommended settings which applies all of the standard Turbo Boost and C1/2/3/etc states enabled and hyperthreading- all of which Avid recommends to disable. At these settings the CPU clock speed is constantly getting boosted whenever the system wants more juice, then dropping off when it's not needed. Allowing the Turbo boost to function gets me lower temperatures than running overclocked at 5 ghz all the time which seems excessive.

I've tried this system many different ways over the past few weeks and the default recommended settings plus the processor affinity tweak are giving the best performance in and out of Pro Tools with my heaviest session (mixed & mastered) coming in UNDER 30% CPU and occasionally peaking above then coming back down. Even tried recording bass onto a new track with low latency monitoring in that session and it worked as expected.

Wanted to share this in case it helps anyone and I'm curious to know if others are seeing similar results not using the recommended optimizations, particularly other i9 users. Please share your experience here.