Disabling Hyper-Threading - any adverse affects?

[Escape-To-88]

As above really chaps.

For emulators my rig seems to prefer hyper-threading disabled in the bios, and I get some nice frame increases, so just wondering how disabling hyper-threading will affect other programs/games? I use Photoshop regularly, Word and play newer titles like Crysis 2, Arkham City (when it's released!) etc. etc.


Thanks

P.S -I know by disabling h/t I am essentially making the 2600k a 2500k, but I paid less for the i7 than an i5 would be, so that doesn't bother me

[briareos_kerensky]

Surely Word will take a huge performance hit without hyper threading, if you make heavy use of it I suggest not to.




Jokes aside, Photoshop could have some performances hit if you normally make heavy use of filters and/or very big images (like 70x50cm @ 300dpi). As long as you feed Photoshop RAM and swap space it'll be happy. Probably with the latest releases having a video card with relatively small amounts of video RAM will impact performances more than anything if GPU acceleration is enabled.
Don't know how the games you mentioned use extra cores, nor how much they are stressing the rest of the system.

[Escape-To-88]

Word in CPU useage shocker

Yeah I've read it's mainly the heavy filters etc. that use hyper-threading, although to be honest if I know I'm going to do that I could simply click the one button in the bios to enable it

The rest of the system is - Frozr ii Twin 560ti OC with 1gb RAM, 8gb Corsair RAM running at 1600mhz and I'm booting from an SSD. I did give Photoshop a run through with some intense stuff and didn't notice much difference.

If someone could let me know on the game front that'd be ace

[Hohum]

Only heavily multi-threaded apps would see a performance reduction really. Games at the moment only tend to make use of 2/3 cores at most, so the reason you're seeing reduced performance with hyper-threading enabled is purely down to poor resource allocation (O/S sees 8 cores available, but doesn't differentiate between physical and logical effectively enough, so you can end up with two threads being dumped on the same core).

Are you using Windows 7? Was under the impression that they had improved the core allocation compared to XP/Vista, but I could be wrong.

[Escape-To-88]

I am using Win 7 yeah, I was also under that impression too. It seems just to affect emulators:-)