overclocking on host only or also on guest?

Discussions related to using VirtualBox on Windows hosts.
Post Reply
SebHellYea
Posts: 5
Joined: 2. May 2021, 20:49

overclocking on host only or also on guest?

Post by SebHellYea »

greez,

i am running VMs on two different hosts. one has an Intel CPU, the other one has an AMD CPU. i am using the Intel overclocking softwarte tool Intel Extreme Tuning Utility to overclock the Intel host and i am using the AMD overclocking softwarte tool AMD Ryzen Master to overclock the AMD host.

now this question might be a bit of a noob question but since i am not experiencing much performance improvement on my VMs i am not sure if i might have to overclock the VMs (hence the guests) as well, and not only the host. this doesn't really make sense to me though since the guests are 'eating' their CPU resources from the already overclocked host, right?

anyway, if someone might have experienced overclocking the guest using the mentioned software tools might be key to better guest performace pls let me know.

thx
BillG
Volunteer
Posts: 5102
Joined: 19. Sep 2009, 04:44
Primary OS: MS Windows 10
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Windows 10,7 and earlier
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: overclocking on host only or also on guest?

Post by BillG »

I can't see any way to overclock the vm independently. Many things in a vm are emulated (which naturally means slower), but not the CPU. The vm will queue requests to the physical processor just like any other program.

What sort of thing are you running in the vm? If you are running a program (such as a video game) which uses a lot of screen changes, it will be slow. The vm has to emulate a GPU - it cannot use the host's. If you are running a program which accesses the disk a lot, make sure the virtual disk is on a fast physical disk, preferably an SSD. These are much more important to vm speed than the processor.
Bill
Post Reply