How to disable Hyper-Threading when the BIOS doesn't give you the option? And how to optimize a CPU for a single-threaded game?

I have an i7 720qm (1.6 GHz quad), and the games I play are TF2 (multicore support questionable), Wargame Airland Battle (dual core according to sys. requirements), and Civ 4.

I seriously doubt HT will assist with such software, and I want to check if its hurting the performance of the games.


On a slightly unrelated question, which config is better for Civ 4? 2.4 GHz dual with HT, or 2.8 GHz single with HT?

 

Just leave it as is I think windows will be smart enough to park cores and clock down cores as needed so a single core may run at the full speed.

I would guess the dual core would be better for your second question (since mundane OS processes can run on it) and the other can be pretty much prioritised for gaming.

 

I remember years ago when I played SC4, Windows 7 attempted to spread out the single-threaded game over all 8 "cores", thus all of them were reporting 12.5% usage, and the CPU only turboed to 1.73 GHz. Even when I locked SC4 to one of the cores, Window 7 prevented any of the scores from being parked (and thus preventing the core that was running SC4 from turboing beyond 1.73 GHz) by occasionally running background tasks on the three idling cores.

 

Hmm I would use something like coretemp or HWINFO to check the core utilisaiton.

Depending on how you were monitoring it (task manager isn't very good I don't think on windows 8), it might have been showing the average speed across all cores. Any single threaded high CPU usage thread spreads itself across all 4 (real) cores for me, it just alternates between all 4 cores at the maximum turbo speed to reduce heat being concentrated on one core. I never had a previous i7, so I can't be 100% sure the 720qm does it.

I think you might be able to use throttle stop or limit your processor management settings (minimum and maximum to 100 in the power profiles, or use high performance). It should force your cpu at maximum turbo speeds if temperature permits.

 

From my own experience, Windows will switch the thread to different cores from time to time, but it should still turbo close to single or dual core max speed anyways. You could use throttlestop to monitor core usage and multiplier.