Disable cores for better performance?

bioshockeruk · 5 Nov 2015 at 23:00

I was having a think earlier on about my old fx6300 and was wondering if I could make use of it in another build for gaming for my son. My thought was that maybe if I disabled 2 cores making it into essentially a quad core instead of hex core I could then increase the overclock and it would perform better at gaming as most games prefer better single thread performance over cores right?

Any thoughts on this, and how would I go about doing so, would this be safe to use and would I gain any advantage from it?

DarkBahamut · 5 Nov 2015 at 23:18

I doubt disabling the cores will gain you much of an extra overclock. Like maybe 100Mhz if you're lucky? Sometimes people drop to 1 core for an all out no holds barred WR OC, but in the real world the difference is minimal unless your temps are really very high (or you want to run unsafe levels of voltage)

Also, bearing in mind that FP resources are shared on those CPUs, you already only have three 'FP cores' as it is, so reducing it further would be a peformance loss in any modern game for sure.

bioshockeruk · 6 Nov 2015 at 00:02

i suppose thinking of it the CPU is made of 3 modules with 2 cores per module rather than being 6 individual cores with their own resources, so in theory if I disable some I would lose performance.

Was just a thought, maybe I'll just go get a low-end i5 and board for him instead

jbh110tdi · 7 Nov 2015 at 00:40

if you have the spare cash I would go for the low end I5 or why not go for an 8350 if you already have a board that will take it?

bioshockeruk · 8 Nov 2015 at 12:55

I have another machine that is using an 8370 already. So if I was to buy anything new now it would be intel side for the better feature set and newer tech. The amd's are old tech. It was just an idea to try and make use of the 6300. Maybe I'll just make a file server out of it so at least it's not wasted.

jbh110tdi · 8 Nov 2015 at 13:07

bioshockeruk said:
I have another machine that is using an 8370 already. So if I was to buy anything new now it would be intel side for the better feature set and newer tech. The amd's are old tech. It was just an idea to try and make use of the 6300. Maybe I'll just make a file server out of it so at least it's not wasted.

yea Ive went from the 8350 to the i5 4690k and im happy with it.
would love to be able to justify getting the i7 4960k but I know my self apart from giving me a better benchmark score it really wouldn't benefit me as it wouldn't give me much improvement in games.

I might look to get a second 970 for sli which then it would be worth going for the i7 though...