Please stop with the 'turboboost lies' miss information. Processors are designed to handle relatively high clock speeds and then are binned (As in down clocked) to reduce failure rates even further. Modern processors are also capable of maintaining said clock speeds for extended periods of time with adequate cooling. If you disagree then please explain I5 4670Ks with a turbo boost frequency of 3.8GHz sustaining clock speeds above 4GHz indefinitely through over clocking, this not being the only example of course. My FX6300 has been running at 4.3GHz on all 6 cores with no issues what so ever for over a year, again above the turbo boost frequency.
The reason is you are lucky. When processors, whether CPUs or GPU, are manufactured the silicon die is quality checked and tested. The chips that fail right away are binned immediately while those that last for the lifetime of the product are kept. This part of the first level culling process. The next go around with the batch entails stress testing this same batch at a more strict testing level. At this point the silicon is clocked up as high as it can go. Those chips that survive the highest clock level, are kept and sold at a premium. The rest are then culled out again until the next level is found. These are sold as consumer-grade chips and are sold to OEMs for the motherboard sales. The highest-level quality chips go to premium manufacturers for servers and high-end pricey systems. The remaining lot, that barely past the tests, but still work go to the cheap, D-grade system builders. These are the ones that sell the really inexpensive bargain systems at the big-box stores and other retailers such as Walmart. As time goes on, the batches are more refined. This is usually seen with chips with the highest stepping level, or the ones that are usually at the end-of-life of the components. By this time the batches are all pretty consistent and it doesn't matter which chip is used.
The thing is you can be very lucky and get a consumer-grade chip that was just on the cusp of being high-end, but failed somewhere - just enough not to meet those strict testing conditions, or maybe the chip was at the highest stepping level (revision), and the quality of the silicon is excellent through out. In this case you can overclock and bring the chip up to its theoretical operating level without degrading the components too much. Other times the overclocking won't work at all, and you'll end up crashing almost immediately. In my days of as a test and circuit technician testing systems, I've seen both ends of the spectrum. We would build systems and put them through rigorous tests to ensure the components could survive various environments. I would setup a test batch one day and spend the next one replacing parts.
Regarding laptops and games...
Yes, laptops are getting faster with more mainstream, albeit, mobile versions of the processors and video cards. We can even maximize the memory up to decent levels in many of these machines these days. The problem though is heat. Heat equals reduced performance and eventual death for computer components. The problem with laptops, unless made to handle workstation-level graphics, or other high CPU and graphics intensive programs, is cooking from the inside out due to inadequate airflow. Many. many laptops literally, and not figuratively speaking here, melt and die after some period of time due to lack of good cooling capabilities. The components will first run in reduced speed mode to try to save themselves from burning up, which degrades the machine performance sometimes considerably. This works to a certain extent, but after continuous high temperatures they will eventually die. This is where the made for gaming and workstation laptops come into play. They are built with adequate ventilation and cooling capabilities not found on the regular laptop. In many cases these machines have actual video cards and not just a mobile chip stuck on the motherboard. They also have real video chips too and don't rely on the AMD or Intel laptop integrated graphics which eat up memory from the system. The thing is you pay the premium for such systems, but in the end it's better than having a machine die very quickly too and having to replace it with another.
Regarding Intel's Turbo-boost...
This is a method that allows burst speeds for the CPU even under stressful conditions. This allows the CPU to quickly process things such as video compression, or graphics rendering but does not kick in for long periods. I tested this on my I7-3770K based system and saw no difference in performance with Trainz TS12 SP1HF4 running, and also during a video compression test so perhaps it's meant for those systems that don't quite have the performance to begin with and need all they can get to process something such as video compression.
John
