My i7-10700F stays at its 2.9 GHz base clock instead of boosting, even when idle or under load. HWiNFO reports a constant 29x multiplier, and Cinebench R20 multi-core scores only 1772. During a full-load test, temperatures remain around 70°C and CPU power is about 37 W, so this does not appear to be thermal or power throttling. HWiNFO only shows the "Max Turbo Limit" flag at 100%. Turbo is enabled in firmware, and the listed turbo ratios go as high as 48x. I have tried different Windows power plans, enabled aggressive boost behavior, removed frequency caps, updated the BIOS, loaded optimized defaults, checked SpeedStep, Turbo Boost, and C-States, tested with Speed Shift disabled, removed the system-management utilities, and confirmed that neither XTU nor ThrottleStop is installed. Dell's hardware diagnostics also found no errors. What could be forcing the processor to remain at its base multiplier?
1 Answer
Hyper-Threading is enabled, but that setting does not normally control whether Turbo Boost works. Disabling it did not change the behavior either: the processor still reports roughly 2.89 GHz with a 29x multiplier during stress testing and at idle. Since temperatures and package power are low, this looks more like a firmware or motherboard performance-policy issue than normal thermal throttling. Recheck every BIOS performance setting, perform a complete power removal and CMOS reset if supported, and compare the multiplier in BIOS hardware monitoring and another utility. If it remains locked after a BIOS reset, the system may need Dell firmware or motherboard support.
I disabled Hyper-Threading and checked again with both HWiNFO and CPU-Z, but the clock stayed at about 2893 MHz with a 29x multiplier, both under stress and without a stress test.