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Disable cores on a Ryzen 9 3950X?

Helen Barber

Helen Barber

Helen Barber

Associate
Joined
9 Aug 2020
Posts
492
Just wondering if it's possible. I'm not making use of all the cores and sometimes have my pc running for a few days at a time.

Just wondering if I can disable cores? IE only use 4-6

:)
 
Why would you need to? Don't unused cores throttle back to a few hundred MHz or even go to 'sleep' whatever that means automatically when not in use?
 
As clv101 said, the machine can take very good care of the cores that are not in use at the moment, I would not disable them. It would be different if you were talking about threads, since some apps run better when multithreading is disabled.
 
As long on your power plan the minimum processor state isn't 90, 95 or 100% (mine is 5%), unused cores will either be at very low frequencies or sleeping. Idling, few things running on background, my 3900x show a whole chip consumption of 30ish Watts. At 16p per kW, at idle, would take roughly 3 days to cost me 16p, without accounting for other costs.
Unless you're running on problems cooling the chip, or keeping a reasonable noise while doing it, no reason to cap the chip. Just the right adjustments required and the chip does all by itself.
Even a GPU, nowadays is quite clever with its power management.
Just make sure there isn't any app/service pushing the processor boost for no reason.
 
Helen Barber said:
Just wondering if it's possible. I'm not making use of all the cores and sometimes have my pc running for a few days at a time.

Just wondering if I can disable cores? IE only use 4-6

:)
Click to expand...

The cores go to sleep when not in use, but if its something you want to make a bit more permanent then do it in the bios, you can effectively change it from a 16 core chip to a 12 core or 8 core chip, or just enable it to use just 1 CCD all the time thereby disabling half the cores, saves having another piece of software in your start up programs everytime your PC boots too.
 
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