i7 Turbo Mode not recognized in VirtualBox

Question

Recently I made the switch to Ubuntu 12.10 as my main OS for my laptop. For the longest time, I've been running Windows 7 with Ubuntu 12.04 inside VirtualBox. As I found myself more and more inside the virtualbox, I decided to switch roles.

The problem I'm seeing is that running windows 7 inside VirtualBox on top of a linux host seems to be slower than when the roles were reversed. One thing in particular I noticed was on the Windows 7 guest vm, the CPU frequency reflected the default frequency (2GHz). To contrast this, I created a Windows 7 VM on top of a windows 7 host and it shows the turbo mode frequency and is much snappier than my VM being hosted on Ubuntu.

Is there anything special I need to do to enable the turbo mode? Are there any other steps I can do to make the virtual machine run better? The VM I created has 4 Cores, 8 GB RAM and 256GB video memory dedicated to it. Since I'm a .NET developer, I need some horsepower when I'm running Windows...

If it's of any help, here are the specs of the machine I'm trying to get this to work on:

Processor: i7-2630QM RAM: 16GB Video: NVidia GTX 460M Storage: 128 GB Crucial M4 SSD, 750GB HDD

Answer 1

If you are allowed to expose it to your VM, it will be in the Virtual Box Settings for the VM Image. It will probably right on the menu where you enable VT-X for your virtual box session. I don't have an I7 Processor so I can't really say. My next bet would be to install the PPA for virtualbox and get the latest and greatest version to see if it would allow me to do that. Then if not check the DEV versions. Sorry I can't be of more help.