How to shut/close cores?

[ob9]

hey ,
I want to go hardcore on bench's and i want to shut off my CPU cores ... how can i do that ?

[BryanFury]

In my motherboard (Gigabyte P55-UD3P), you can set it in the BIOS. Check your motherboard manufacturer's site for specific details.

[PrairieDawg]

I'm curious as to what the point of shutting down cores on a CPU would be?

[BryanFury]

Yeah, maybe it will help you cut down your electric bills.

[SCSIraidGURU]

Q6600 with less cores is like replacing a 100W bulb with 60W bulb. You won't save that much on your bill.

Benchmarks don't prove much. They are not a real test of performance. Disabling anti-virus and other application while benchmarking will improve performance.

Shutting down cores will not have an effect. Few benchmarks are multicore. You could set the affinity for the application to one core. However, it is unicore app, it will only hit one core.

[wayout44]

Originally Posted by PrairieDawg

I'm curious as to what the point of shutting down cores on a CPU would be?

Core scaling of cause.

[Psycho101]

Benchmarks are a perfectly legitimate way to test performance.They're the only simple way to verify and quantify any improvements a component upgrade or over clock has made. If you score 1000 before and 1250 after then you've quite obviously gained performance.

For a more realistic "real world" kind of benchmark, use PC Mark Vantage. It uses REAL aplications and REAL world usage patterns to test every component.

Shutting down cores won't provide much benefit. It certainly has nothing to do with core scaling other than preventing it, which will either do nothing or decrease performance. If you want a benchmark or any other application to use a single core then set the Affinity in task manager to only use the core of your choice. If you are thinking that if disabling cores at the hardware level may give you a better OC, you may be right but there's no way to reliably do this. In some BIOS's you can limit the number of cores detected, but by how many depends on the BIOS. Some let you run a multi core as a single but most will limit you to a max of three.