Should i unlock cores

The process involved tuning each core individually and slightly raising the CPU voltage - more cores required more energy. MSI and Gigabyte probably made the boards with the best unlocking technology. ECS also had some decent unlocking features. Patrick Jackson Don't waste your time and energy on listening to these useless rumours.

It is just a hoax. No, there is no way to do it. Dimal Chandrasiri if the cores are locked by the manufacturer, you cannot unlock them.. Nikhil Chandak see this one.

In conclusion,they were not useful. It was out of scope for a common user. Jan Fritsch I only know of AMD doing this on certain processors but it's hardly worth trying to unlock. Worst thing that can happen is that your CPU will end up dead - which is in fact the worst thing. I also believe they have stopped making it that easy as they are effectively losing money by people buying lower spec processors and unlocking them. In most cases cores, be it an actual core of a CPU or a shader unit on a graphics card are mostly disabled via laser cut or similar.

Jan Fritsch Forgot, as for the Intel processor:. Yes, the DIE does have 8 cores but 2 of them are as explained above physically disabled. No way to enable them. That larger L3 cache permits quicker data exchanges among the cores, which improves performance in applications that are optimized for multiple cores If the cores are sealed by the manufacturer, don't bother wasting your time, as it wont be possible.

Which should you pick? Table of Contents Show. If the multiplier is unlocked, the CPU can be overclocked freely by adjusting the multiplier, whereas a locked CPU cannot be overclocked this way.

If you want to know more about the Intel CPU naming scheme and different designations, best check out this article. Well, when it comes to gaming, the answer is usually: no. Of course, this would depend largely on how CPU-intensive a game is and whether the CPU is bottlenecking the GPU, but in general, the in-game performance gain from CPU overclocking generally comes down to a handful of frames. However, starting with Windows XP in , Windows began supporting multi-core operations and many application developers followed suit.

As a result, pretty much any resource-intensive software you use today will fully utilize the power of the multi-core processor that you almost certainly have running under the hood. Check out this detailed article about multi-core processing for more information.

The answer is that it really depends on the version of Windows you are running. For older versions of Windows, such as Windows XP, you might need to change a system setting in your BIOS in order to get multi-core functionality working.

In any newer version of Windows, however, multi-core support is automatically turned on; you can adjust your settings to use fewer cores if necessary to fix a software compatibility reason, but this is exceptionally rare. The only time you would use this technique is to limit cores, whether for software compatibility reasons or otherwise. This is because Windows is configured to utilize all cores whenever a program has the ability to use them.

In Windows Vista, 7 and 8, the multi-core setting is accessed through the same msconfig process as described above for Windows It is also possible in Windows 7 and 8 to set processor affinity, that is, to tell the operating system to use a particular core for a particular program. You may notice that twice as many cores are listed than you have. This is because hyperthreading effectively doubles your cores, with four real and four virtual.