Guild Wars 2

While reading around for ways to improve my fps, I found a claim that unparking cpus can help.

My computer has about 8 cpus (it’s an i7) and I’m wondering if unparking actually does improve cpus and/or if its advisable to unpark them (and if it is if I can get some advice on which program to use and how many I should unpark).

Thanks for any help you can give.

A lot of things I’ve read about this is that it’s mostly helped AMD users and when it helped Intel users, there was a boost for a temporary period of time. I actually don’t think it’s needed when you can instead just set the computer’s power profile to High Performance. It’s pretty self explanatory but one of the things it also does is disable core parking.

i7 doesn’t really have 8 cores. It has 4 real cores but tells the OS it has 8 because it can run at a slightly higher efficiency if it has more work to do. The OS assigns work to the real 4 cores first because the performance gain from the 4 fake cores on average isn’t that significant, less than an additional core worth of performance.

The AMD FX-8xxx/9xxx actually has 8 cores but each core is significantly slower than one of Intel’s. However it scales fairly linearly from one to eight cores.

Now when someone says “unparking cores” it means not powering down or stepping down the clock rate of cores that aren’t being assigned work because the work threshold of the active cores have decreased to the point that the remaining cores can handle it. While powering/revving up cores is nearly instantaneous, it’s still nearly, a little bit of time is wasted. Usually setting your power profile in Windows to performance eliminates parking altogether but any power saving/fan noise reduction features are disabled.

It is Highly recommended to unpark your cores,here is a great tool that will unpark them for you without having to mess with your registry.You can revert the settings back aswell,theres absolutely no danger in doing so.

http://coderbag.com/Programming-C/CPU-core-parking-manager

If your processor has hyper-threading (why you see 8 cores when you have a quad core processor), you should unpark them. I doubt you see a noticeable performance gain while playing, but I did notice a marked shorter zone load times (after the first log in….that is still pretty long). Might just be my imagination.

I warn anyone against using those parking tools….everyone I tried to use had malware connected to either downloading or installing them….editing the registry is not that big a deal.

Brother Grimm.5176:

If your processor has hyper-threading (why you see 8 cores when you have a quad core processor), you should unpark them. I doubt you see a noticeable performance gain while playing, but I did notice a marked shorter zone load times (after the first log in….that is still pretty long). Might just be my imagination.

I warn anyone against using those parking tools….everyone I tried to use had malware connected to either downloading or installing them….editing the registry is not that big a deal.

There is no malware inside this tool,please dont spread disinfo.

Core Parking only works for secondary threads (’cores) that are part of your CPU.

Windows doesnt shut down physical cores that are used to thread up applications.

Intel, this would be your HT based cores (all logical, nothing really physical)

AMD this would be your 2nd core per module (if your OS has been patched for the FX modules).

All the tool does is tells windows to not sleep those 2nd threads, and keep them active and keep sending applications to them.

I’ve unparked my CPUs a couple weeks ago, I noticed a slight performance increase in GW2.

As for temperatures and system stability – all good. Highly recommended.

I’ve read on a few forums that this helps other games such as Rome 2, Battlefield 3/4 and other CPU bound games.

EDIT: The tool from coderbag.com is virus free. All the tool does is check a few registry entries and modifies them for you. You can even revert those settings if for whatever reason you don’t like them.

Caedmon.6798:

Brother Grimm.5176:

If your processor has hyper-threading (why you see 8 cores when you have a quad core processor), you should unpark them. I doubt you see a noticeable performance gain while playing, but I did notice a marked shorter zone load times (after the first log in….that is still pretty long). Might just be my imagination.

I warn anyone against using those parking tools….everyone I tried to use had malware connected to either downloading or installing them….editing the registry is not that big a deal.

There is no malware inside this tool,please dont spread disinfo.

Didn’t say that one did have, but lots of tools like that download from sites that insert malware into the installation process….that’s what I was warning folks about. The tool itself may be fine, but where many of them reside for download is the issue.

Malware is not a virus…..it’s extra crap (toolbars, etc.) that gets installed when you download / install lots of free utilities from sites (but you are correct that coderbag.com does not have such issues).