CPU A Guide to Disable Core Parking, to gain performance in games!

What is Core Parking? - Core Parking is a power saving feature, which stops some of your cores running.
Have you ever wondered why only your physical cores only run in games, and the HT threads are Parked?...This is due to this power saving feature. This is a guide to how to unlock this feature.

Max Silencio CPU after disabling parked cores. GTA IV on his 3930K (Below)


How To Disable CPU Core Parking For Multi-Core Processors, editing the Registry.

0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c­318583 -Registry key from the Video, so you can copy and paste.



So if You don't like to mess with registry here's a simple tool:

Disable CPU Core Parking Utility.

Clicky

Once you have done 1 of the 2, you will now need to restart your computer for it to take effect!


Doing this on my Laptop, has given it a new lease of life, but does drain the battery more.

Enjoy!

Cheers,

Simon

 

Will it work for both cores of my cpu?

 

It's worth a shot on your CPU, but peeps with HT are gaining more FPS. As games don't really use the HT Threads from your CPU, until you un-parked them.

 

worth a go I guess. Coincidentally decided to start playing through GTA4 last night, seem to be capped at 65fps (before vsync), if it makes a difference I'll post back!

 

Please do, with your RIG Specs, and your FPS gains, if any.

 

I don't know why people keep blaming HT for this, Windows is parking the cores. I prefer to leave HT on, using software like convertxtoDVD u can setup the application to use 8 threads for encoding and it makes a huge difference.

Core parking is not a problem created by having a CPU with hyper threading, it's a Windows feature to save power and disable cores not in use.

 

Where have I stated about turning HT off? Yes I know Windows parks unused threads, to save power. But until you unpark the threads, no game will utilise all the threads.
This is why people are getting more FPS in games with parking turned off, as the games are using the HT threads as well.

 

So this only affects CPU's with hyperthreading, right? The Core 2 Duo in my laptop won't notice a difference? Well I'll slap the utility in my desktop and see if it makes a difference.

 

Have a look in Task manager, Click on CPU tab, and see if 1 of your cores is Parked (As pictured above).

 

Anyone with a mains power meter? Can you measure the power draw difference in everyday/browsing mode with parking on and off? Just tried, but my meter is foobar... constantly reading 0watts... LOL. I wish.

 

Core 2 Duo won't. Conroe and Penryn cores were power gated to the package not the core. It would either send the whole die into a C3 state or both CPUs would be 'active'. If you had a C2Q with two dies you could get 2 cores parking on one of the dies.

Lynnfield was the first notebook part to be per-core power gated (Nehalem was on Desktop).

 

I don't have one, so I can't help there...

Congrats on your 33k post

Thanks for the info.

So only people with a Q6600 and above will get parked cores?

 

Never saw a parked core on my i5-750. Somewhat sceptical of this tweak, because if games and apps demand the power the CPU should be providing it anyway.

 

I've also never seen a parked core on my i5 750, but I disabled core parking just in case. For me it made no difference so I just re enabled it to save a bit of power.

 

Tried this last night though I only ran heaven maxed out, not the best cpu test

My 2600k cores were parking at the desktop, I unparked them made no difference to fps

would probably only affect a few games gta must be one of them maybe someone could try Civ V total war

Cant see this making a big difference to power usage

 

Interesting, will have to try this when I get home and runs some tests before and after to see if there is any gain.

 

Windows would have to park both cores at once. Maybe. I don't know what C state 'parked' constitutes to so I can't say for sure.

 

Why not try it on BF3? A lot of people are saying they are getting good gains from it.

I would, but I have no GPU's at the mo...No gaming for a couple of weeks

 

I will give this a go on my i5 2500K, see what happens.

 

No worries. I'm sure someone will post there findings with those CPU's and above.