Unpark cores on an i5?

[horrorshow]

I'm getting contradictory reports on this, does unparking only yield benefits on i7's?

Thanks,
- [H]orrorshow

 

[Araxie]

unparking tricks only yield benfits under windows 7.. from windows 8 and above isn't necessary to force the OS unpark cores 100% of the time.. about benefits it benefits everything, even i3...

 

[melk]

How do you park cores on Windows 7?

 

[Araxie]

Easiest way is with CoderBag CPU core parking another way is via regedit

 

[Dekar12]

Is there much difference as far as performance when you force cores to be unparked?

I would think that you are losing more energy savings (battery life if on a laptop) by doing this?

 

[primetime]

Easiest way is with CoderBag CPU core parking another way is via regedit

So actually core parking is sorta like an operating system level C-States? Where the cores will drop to a very slow cpu speed when nothing needs it? Reason i ask is when i looked in my power menu only thing i saw was active/passive cooling? I can visually see the cores dropping from time to time while idle...if its set to passive...set to active its like the core speed never changes, for what i can see

I Always use full C-states setting in the bios anyway. When i have checked in the past, that was the biggest help in power draw...newer boards might be different?

 

[Araxie]

active and passive states as you said change how the clocks behave to maintain the chip with the lower power consumption if entered in passive mode, that help a lot for example laptops to keep temps down and also help with battery life..

Now core parking, it's also a "power saving feature" which park and unpark the system threads, normally a windows 7 even in performance mode with minimum processor state to 100% will still aggressively park what it thinks is unnecessary threads, is important to mention that this later was patched and updated to allow a more faster and responsive core unparking mechanism however still produced some lag and/or stutter when the requested power was necessary and the system wasn't fast enough to manage the activation of threads, which in system with hyperthreaded CPUs was an issue, by forcing the OS to keep all cores active you received a snappier overall system, specially for gaming as the game never have to wait for the OS to park/unpark a CPU core, this initially also helped by a large amount AMD FX CPUs to increase considerably the performance in games.

the power consumption its completely negligible, in all of my test with different intel and AMD platforms it never resulted in any variance of power more than maybe 1-4W which enter in the margin of error perfectly and no variance in idle temps. I think core unparking its a must do in windows 7 system.