why is my i5 core at 100%?

With a Bad Company 2 session running in the background, when I look at resource monitor my 4th "core" is running at 100%. I have a mobile i5 520 (2 cores, 4 threads). Is this normal? Seems like load would be distributed more evenly. "Maximum Frequency" seems to be above 100% also. This is the 2nd machine I've seen it this way.

 

That's not how multithreading works. The main thread for BC2 is much more intensive than the other ones.

 

Caring share how you overclocked the i7?

 

Yes, it's normal. It's a lot of the reason that an i7 isn't a huge boon to most games, because threading is very often not evenly distributed. Most games run a single thread for almost all processing tasks, especially older games.

Your Maximum Frequency is above 100% because that's the Turbo Boost feature of your i5 kicking in. When one thread is creating a lot of load and others are not doing much, it will overclock the one core (from 2.4GHz normal up to 2.933GHz in the case of the i5-520M) to make the game perform that much better.

This is a matter that is better solved in a PM, not in hijacking a random thread.

 

Ah, that's what I figured. Thanks.

 

can only be done on Asus G73H as setfsb works on it... as for OP , don't worry , BC2 is a very CPU stressing game and actually needs a quad as recommended so if u CPU is being stressed out fully , there is nothing abnormal.