How to increase processor performance through power settings (parking cores, how to enable all CPU cores ✔)

Good time!

I thought for a long time whether to publish today's article, because the question is rather controversial (and the result after configuration may vary for everyone, depending on the hardware and software). And yet, I ask you to treat the article critically and as an "experimental" ...

And so, closer to the topic. Windows does not always work "perfectly" with multi-core processors. In order to reduce power consumption, a number of processes can be performed on the core on which they were originally launched (this approach allows: on the one hand (positive) - not to use all the cores all the time (and thereby reduce power consumption), and on the other (negative ) - does not allow the processor to work to its fullest).

In addition, the function parking cores allows the processor (under a certain load) to transfer all tasks to one core, and put the rest into standby mode (i.e., only one core will actually work). Naturally, this reduces overall performance (although it makes the system more responsive, but only slightly). Note that Windows also does not work correctly with parked cores on Intel processors (at least Windows 7).

So, by setting certain power settings, you can limit the operation of the core parking function and increase overall performance (in some cases, up to 20%!). In my opinion, it makes sense to try to spend 3-5 minutes. on the "experiment"!

Note: first of all, this topic concerns multi-core processors from Intel (to be honest, I don't have adequate statistics on AMD. But you can try ...).

How to fine-tune the processor power supply

In order not to be unfounded about improving performance, I will give one small performance test in WinRAR (official site of the archiver). In the screenshot below: on the left, you can see the overall speed before the settings were optimized; on the right - after. Even with the naked eye, you can see that in tests the CPU starts to work faster (which has a positive effect in real tasks, the same games, for example).

Performance difference

Note: I recommend that you run the test in WinRAR first before optimizing the settings (and remember the overall speed), and then run the test after optimization. Then just compare these numbers, in some cases it is possible to squeeze another 10-20% out of the CPU!

An important point!

As I said above, this issue primarily concerns multi-core processors (4 cores and higher). To find out the number of cores of your CPU, just run the CPU-Z utility, and look at the bottom of the window: in the Cores column, you will see the number of cores (example below).

CPU-Z - 4 Cores (4 cores, 8 threads)

1) And so, you need to start by setting the registry.

The point is that Windows hides some of the power settings by default. To open them for editing, you need to make certain changes to the registry. The easiest way to do this is using a ready-made settings file, which you just need to run and agree to adding parameters to the system registry. Here is the prepared file: core_parking (you need to extract it from the archive and run it. The archive is packed using WinRAR, relevant for Windows 7-10).

Registry Editor - Settings have been successfully entered into the registry

Just in case, I will give the text of this file a little below (for security purposes, suddenly someone doubts the file and wants to make changes to the registry manually).

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Power \ PowerSettings \ 54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00 \ 0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c318583]