Modern CPUs will pretty much always try to boost as long as they have the thermal and power headroom to do so (see race to sleep). Talking about mean, median, a

Modern CPUs will pretty much always try to boost as long as they have the thermal and power headroom to do so (see race to sleep). Talking about mean, median, and 'mode' of performance is going to be tricky because it'll be heavily dependent on how the tests are being run. Things like, is there enough time to rebuild thermal headroom between iterations, or does a single iteration ever actually run enough to exhaust its thermal headroom will effect the results of multiple runs. So returning to the base point, any reduction in boost frequency in -normal- usage (seperate from benchmarking) will cause (machine) measureable (but maybe not perceived) performance loss because everything is built around trying to crank out work as quickly as possible for as short of a time as possible.