What is turbo boost?

This thread is long dead, but I stumbled upon it, and had a thought. A while back I noticed that while I was playing certain games on higher graphics settings, that my battery, even though plugged into the wall, would actually drain instead of charging. Could turbo boost have been on, having my system run at 4.0GHz, and caused that to happen?

Example: say you have a Macbook Pro 2.6 GHZ i7 quad. Most everything you do will run about 1.5 GHZ unless you run a program which demands more. Such as Handbrake which will take the GHZ to 2.5 but never to max.

There is a utility you can install to observe all what happens; IntelÆ Power Gadget go download it and enjoy.

jpcguy89 wrote:

This thread is long dead, but I stumbled upon it, and had a thought. A while back I noticed that while I was playing certain games on higher graphics settings, that my battery, even though plugged into the wall, would actually drain instead of charging. Could turbo boost have been on, having my system run at 4.0GHz, and caused that to happen?

Possibly, another possibility is that Apple make different size power supplies for different model Macs. For example I have a 15" MacBook Pro Retina and it comes with an 85w power supply, the 13" MacBook Pro uses just a 60w power supply. If you did plug a 60w power supply in to the 15" model MacBook it would usually power the MacBook but not have enough power to simultaneously recharge the battery. The MacBook Air has an even smaller power supply of just 45w.

Maybe you can install BootCamp windows and manually change the frequency.

Hello Grant, what do you mean "lightly loaded Mac"?