How would one go about LOCKING a core on an Athlon II X3?

[Mushu]

Just out of curiosity

Or maybe not locking but just disabling. Can it be done using software? Would one have to make modifications to the BIOS?

 

[JFAMD]

There is a feature in Opteron called core select that will let you do that, but it has to be built into the BIOS in order to take advantage of it.

People use that to boost the cache/core ratio or the memory bandwidth/core ratio, or possibly for licensing reasons.

Why would you want to do that with a client processor?

 

[Mushu]

Mostly just to satisfy my curiosity. I'm building a system with an Athlon II X3 and I wondered how much of a difference it would make to go down to just two cores and meddle with the clock speeds.

Since the components will likely find themselves in another system in a very small enclosure sometime in the coming year, I also wondered if I could benefits in terms of heat-generation from locking a core and maybe undervolting and underclocking!

Er, hopefully without crippling it completely

Thanks for the answer! I wonder if it can be done on the Asus M4A785TD-M EVO...

 

[nismotigerwvu]

Sadly, I don't think it makes a difference. I remember seeing some people run tests with Athlon II X2's on power draw and OC with and without the extra 2 cores unlocked with acc and the results were the same both ways.

 

[heyheybooboo]

Not sure if you can do this in AMD 'game fusion' or not.

You can use the CPU affinity in the task manager.

I have a single-threaded program that converts TP (HD transport streams) files that runs 10-13% faster when I set the CPU affinity to a single core.



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[Oceandevi]

Here is a motherboard that can disable cores. Gigabyte ma770 ud3p
It has that ACC deal which can be used for all sorts of fun.