Disabling cores on i7-720qm to kick-in turbo boosting

It appears that Starcraft II is very CPU intensive (in particular, the CPU clock speed) and uses only up to 2 cores.

Hence, is it possible to disable 2 cores on i7-720QM (for all applications) so as to turbo boost the clock speed from 1.6 GHz to 2.4 GHz?

If it helps, I'm using Asus G51J with the following specs:
i7-720qm
GTX 260m 1 GB VRAM
4 GB RAM

 

I wouldn't do anything until you have evidence that the OS and the CPU don't handle turbo-boosting adequately themselves.

To that end, you might want to download the application Turbo Boost Technology Monitor, available from Intel.

 

You can't disable all of the background work. But even if you could, they would just run on the 2 cores you have left, hurting your performance anyways. If you're playing in full screen, it's running at 2.4 most of the time as is, windows manages processes on it's own.

I've had no issues with the game at all, what video settings are you running?

 

Medium - Low, except for textures which is Ultra (changing textures does not affect my fps)

This is to get somewhat playable fps of about 20-30 during battles, which may dip to sub-20s. It gets a little hard to perform mouse controls smoothly at such fps

Also, I used NVIDIA system monitor to check my resource usage during SC2. It appears that while CPU usage is 100%, my GPU is at best using up to 60%.

 

If Starcraft 2 only uses two cores, shouldn't Turbo Boost be in effect already?

Anyway, if you want to "force" it, open Task Manager, Processes tab -> right-click on the Starcraft.exe -> Set Affinity -> Uncheck two cores

 

I am wondering how it compares?

i7 720QM running on two cores with turbo boost Vs. Core 2 Duo T9900.


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It runs much faster on my w870 than my HDX20 with a x9000 at stock.

OP: Lock wPrime to core 0 and core 7, and shutdown everything else as if you were going to play starcraft. Do it twice and post your score here.

 

umgh do u mean only tick 2 boxes or uncheck 2 boxes?

 

Both of those say the same thing, make sure only two boxes are checked.

 

thanks. I'll take note of it when i get my i7..

 

you could use:

run msconfig.exe
select the boot tab
click advanced options
click number of processors check box
set the drop down to 4

now reboot.

I think windows will now use 2 real cores + 2 ht.

I tried this thinking it might not use ht just the real cores but the frizs bench score was to low.