Well, it's an i7. And this i7 pulls 4.4ghz on all cores no problem. At first I thought I was dealing with a heater of a chip, but I found out my motherboard was getting a little out of pocket with voltage. I put a 1,25V all core fixed voltage to this chip and it hits that 4.4ghz all day, staying under 70C on my Hyper 212 cooler. But, I did drop it into an H370 board which required a BIOS flash, so I think the manual intervention on auto settings is understandable. My games are fast and unflinching. That's all I really use my computer for, so won't speculate on it's performance elsewhere.