How to disable core parking? (G73JH)

Hey guys,

Can someone tell me step by step on how to disable core parking?

I've tried searching this forum with no success.

Cheers.

 

Due to differing setups, power profiles, etc... there is no single way of doing it, you'll need to google that.

 

There's a thread about it here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/microsoft-windows-7/486478-fix-win7-i7-sluggish-performance.html

Here's the jist of it though:

The Fix
- Go to Regedit
- Select Edit > Find... and find this key: " 0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c318583 "
- Within this key, there is a value called: " ValueMax " This value represents the % number of cores the system will park
- Change the value of " ValueMax" to 0 so that, it matches " ValueMin "
- You will have to find the key a few times and repeat the process for each time it is found - the number of instances will depend on the number of power profiles in your system. To do this go back up to Edit > Find Next. (I had 3 instances of this key in my registry.)
- Do a full shutdown and power-off and cold-re-start.

 

I will admit I know nothing about core parking besides the very basic stuff
1) does disabling core parking add any performance advantages in games and benchmarks?
2) is it only useful to save battery life?
3) is disabling core parking automatically done in W7 when you have your laptop set in performance mode?

 

1. Yup
2. That's what it's designed to do - to decrease power consumption on the CPU
3. Nope. I was curious about that myself and I just test it to be sure. The threads are disabled regardless of your power plan settings. I usually set my in performance mode and I'm seeing 4 threads (one from each core) being parked. In all power plans, they are immediately enabled as soon as I run some CPU intensive program such as Prime95.

 

Thanks DAVID
How much of a performance gain do you see?

 

I'm not sure what you're asking David - I didn't see anywhere he stated he turned off core parking.

It's extremely unlikely you'll notice any performance increase by disabling core parking.

There is a very small percentage of multithreaded applications that are reported to be sensitive to Windows 7's aggressive core parking scheme, resulting in stutters and lags.

If you're seeing stuff like that it could be worth a try to disable core parking and see if it helps. Just don't expect miracles or performance increases.

 

Maybe I misunderstood but I thought he did when he answered my third question, like I stated in my first post I really don't know much about core parking hence my original question.
So what exactly is it good for?

 

It's good for power savings, since most PC CPU cores spend the vast majority of their time in an idle state.

The problem is, the OS thread scheduler takes time to unpark cores when they're needed - a very small amount of time, but time non the less. The algorithms used to schedule threads aren't always friendly to software that expects threads to run in an expected timely fashion.

From a Windows programming point of view, it's not an easy thing to deal with. Windows is not a real-time operating system running on real-time hardware, so the scheduler is tuned to a balance between power and efficiency that works for the majority of software and users. Unfortunately it's impossible to make it right for every situation.

 

Thanks!
That helps out a lot.
I just got learned

 

I know this isn't scientific, but when I disabled core parking, my 3DMark 06 score went up by 400-500 points.

 

Disabling core parking doesn't cause a temp increase, does it? I would suspect not, since you're not actually putting more power through, but I also know little to nothing on the subject.

 

Here's the update:

As far as temps go, they are negligible with only a 1C increase at most when idle.

Performance-wise, I don't see much of a difference. With the cores/threads set to never park, synthetic benchmarks reveal minor increase in scores (as Keith1341 pointed out), but it's certainly not enough for my brain to make out any performance differences.

 

Thanks for the update.
Interesting results!

 

I agree with you. While a synthetic benchmark showed an improvement for me, real world usage has not been as obvious.

The only thing I will say though is that the hitching and stuttering in some games that I would experience has since stopped altogether since I disabled the core parking.

 

Sweet, thanks for the info, David. I imagine it's not a huge deal since the battery life sucks so bad on this model anyway, but out of curiosity, is there a noticeable loss of operating time on battery with core parking disabled? Even with my current laptop which gets decent battery life (~3-5 hr), I never really use it unplugged, so it won't be an issue for me. Just wondering.

 

Why don't you test and tell us?

It wasn't really meant to save battery life. It's a green thing.

 

Oh, because I don't actually have mine yet, haha. I ordered it a few days ago, and I'm just biding my time by trying to learn as much about the system as I can before I even get my grubby little hands on it.

Like I said, it really doesn't matter to me either way. Just making conversation, I suppose.

 

Me too. I'll be patiently waiting for your test results

 

hi guys...

short Q... iv made changes in regedit, then shut my lappy down... and then boot normally again ..... didnt catch what "cold reboot means".... did i miss something? how i can recognize that my cores are now not parking...

apprectiate

 

Task Manager - > Resource Monitor->CPU

See if any cores say parked.

 

hm, here graphs on entertainment mode... seems that all cores are working together...

 

That's Task Manager, you want Resource Monitor. See the second link in my sig.

 

Click on "Sledovani..." or whatever