Disabling cores

[danieljury3]

I have an Athlon II X4 620 that I've overclocked to 3.0Ghz on stock cooling and I can't really go any higher without the processor slowing itself down due to the temperature. As the program I want to run better, PCSX2 only uses 2 cores, could I disable one or two cores decrease the temperature so I can Increase the clock speed of the remaining cores and how much of an increase would I get?

[potatochobit]

no.

 

well it depends

are you running the program now and you are overheating?

or are you running a benchmark and it causes the overheating?

 

you might be able to get a little more speed though but the temperature will still be high.

so if you are certain you want to keep pushing the processor you will need a new heatsink anyway.

[danieljury3]

Ive just looked around in my bios for an option to let me disable a core but the closest thing I could find was Advanced Clock Calibration which would allow me to change the clock speed of individual cores by +/-12%

[sack_patrol]

Ive just looked around in my bios for an option to let me disable a core but the closest thing I could find was Advanced Clock Calibration which would allow me to change the clock speed of individual cores by +/-12%

Somewhere around the ACC should be something related that would let you unlock or lock cores. Though it depends on the BIOS and the CPU I guess... I have the ability to unlock up to 4 cores or lock up to 3 cores, so I would get a single core CPU. At first I didn't find the option but when I looked closer I found it.

 

Not sure that even if such an option is supported by your BIOS, your CPU will allow it.

[slick2500]

I dont know if your borad is the same as mine, but I have to set ACC mode from normal to hybrid to see the core controls.

[Waco]

Not sure that even if such an option is supported by your BIOS, your CPU will allow it.

The MSI board that BluePanda just got allowed individual activation/deactivation of cores when I was fiddling with the ACC controls. My older P35 Intel board allows me to enable/disable specific cores as well.

 

It helps temperatures quite a bit (especially if I disable a single core on each die) with my quad though obviously performance drops quite a bit as well.