p150hm turn off hyperthreading?

From what I hear the consensus is that hyperthreading can be a detriment to gaming, but people should try disabling it and seeing if there's a performance increase. The general feeling among those who play Skyrim for instance feel things are snappier without it. Is it possible to disable HT on the p150hm? I can't find the setting in the BIOS.

 

It's not by any means. It's not possible to turn it off on a mobile chip, as far as I am aware.

There's no reason to do so anyway.

 

You can turn it off. And it will also lower CPU temp. However, you need access to advance bios menu or extract the bios , tweak it the setting you want ( turn off hyperthreading) then flash it again. I have done this on my Envy, CPU runs much cooler.

 

I think he is talking about disable core-parking.
I have disabled mine and it is beneficial to gaming and smoothness.


To turn off core parking in Windows 7
See this link:

http://ultimatecomputers.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3644


Done

 

^
Nah, core parking doesn't affect much. Everyone games know that HT does affect performance, especially BF3 hence people turn off HT and it works out.
Running with only 4 true physical cores is better for gaming from what I experience with. And beside CPU is cooler by 5-6 celsius

 

You could try the following: set processor affinity at program start

 

I'm aware of program affinity but that only helps when running certain programs... I would prefer to disable it completely to reduce heat and (possibly) power consumption. Also I don't want to have to go through all my programs and disable cores 2, 4, 6, and 8 for every single one.

I've never modded a BIOS myself before. is there any documentation I can look at to figure out how to mod mine to disable HT?

 

The bios is AMI, I have the tools but I haven't got a Clevo yet so I can't do much investigation... However, there are some people (Prema and Ryan on this forum) that have been trying to unlock this bios, but apparently it has a lockbit, that reset all the changed values to stock on reboot.

There's still hope, but it's risky. You have to extract the bios, change the value and flash it with those value as default settings. I did this on my Envy, once I had to replace the mobo. . . If you are really enthusiastic about this, contact Prema and Ryan and see if they can give you a guide on extracting the bios and putting it back. Just be careful with what you change

here's a sneakpeak of the bios menu



I will upload the tools when i get home

 

so... am I reading you right that all I have to do is extract the bios, change the entry for hyperthreading, repack it, and flash? using some sort of tool, obviously

 

easier said than done trust me

 

It's easy and right if you do your homework correctly. Just bare in mind the risk.

I hope one day resellers' technicians can unlock this for customers..

 

I don't have the BIOS in an .iso file, so I'm assuming it's already unpacked. I have the EC update (I'm assuming that's the SA1 file) and the BIOS update (the LS3 file?) and a few executables in each folder. Do I need to mess with the EC update as well? or any of the executables?

 

An alternative could be turning off the Turbo Boost. Turning it off can decrease heat and power consumption. This thread shows how to proceed with it;
http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-xps-studio-xps/590543-xps-l502x-turbo-boost-2-0-a.html

 

They probably can, but then they will cancel all the warranty or add a premium to it.

 

I can only speak for PowerNotebooks, but we never see a Sager/Clevo in our workshop, so tinkering with those settings is entirely up to Sager and Clevo.

 

Hey thanks man! That will indeed come handy

 

that seems pretty useful, but what I'm mostly trying to do by turning off hyperthreading is increase power in games, not decrease it. I'll definitely use that for power saver mode while i'm off AC though.

 

technically the ht cores being parked are almost as good as them being disabled i would reckon?

btw that turboboost disable workaround deserves a cookie