Windows 10 system overheating and CPU Core Parking

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Another important note from CH: I am writing to you this email to bring to your attention something that I believe a lot of your readers with older PC
[See the full post at: Windows 10 system overheating and CPU Core Parking]

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CH wrote “to avoid the built-in overclocking which is officially designated as Turbo Mode by Intel”

The warranties of both Intel and AMD are not impaired in any way if Turbo Boost Technology is used, so they must believe it’s okay.

CH wrote “I am expecting this tuning to significantly extend the life of the older CPUs and motherboards”

Intel takes Turbo Boost Technology into account when making processors, choosing the chips which can handle it. Intel chooses the highest-quality chips for i7s, with the next best saved for i5-Ks, and so on. It’s true that heat is the enemy of all solid state components, but that’s what Noctua coolers are for. Besides, in five years, W-13 won’t run so well on CH’s old architecture.

Core parking assigns threads to physical cores over virtual ones if the former have sufficient capacity, saving energy but reducing performance slightly. Gamers claim that core parking is also employed in processors with all physical cores, but I have not seen this (I don’t have a all-core laptop processor to test, though).

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Is the “parking” functionality enabled by default in Windows 8 or 8.1?

What about when the Power Plan is set to High Performance in Windows 8 or 8.1?

Thanks.

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Maybe I’m getting increasingly paranoid about Microsoft and Intel’s cosy partnership in regards to W10-Skylake, but I would even think this was done “accidentally” to ensure expiring of older computers to spur the purchase of newer hardware and get more people onto Win10.

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Seems like such a rookie mistake from Microsoft, but I guess that’s what you get when you don’t retain experience in your organization.

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@PC Cobbler If you look at my original post, I mentioned that it is targeted to those with old motherboards and PCs who are interested to extend the life of their computers few more years after upgrading to Windows 10. Those users are the majority of the readers of this site and even if most are not convinced to upgrade yet and in many cases for good reason, many of those same readers will eventually upgrade.
I specifically mentioned that it is not meant to be implemented on the newer platforms designed for Windows 10, as on those platforms it is Microsoft’s and Intel’s duty to take care of the design.
Warranty has no relevance for those users who have and use with good enough performance PCs/laptops beyond the manufacturer’s warranty period and are not very pleased with the 3 years replacement cycle promoted by manufacturers.
There is no point to argue about this subject as I think we have a different perspective in this matter and your considerations are valid too.

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I don’t know about Windows 8.x because I skipped those operating systems. It can be identified though by looking at those registry keys which are the same for all versions. If there is enough interest, I may install a virtual machine one day and confirm which is the default configuration in Windows 8.1.
In principle though, the Core Parking is disabled by design in High Performance plans.

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This is how Core Parking can be monitored. Open Task Manager and under the Performance tab, open Resource Monitor. On the CPU tab, when the PC is mostly idle, some of the cores would show as Parked if Core Parking is enabled. This is mostly visible for CPUs with multiple cores, logical (hyperthreaded) and/or physical.

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I tend to agree with you.

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It may be the result of a mixture of events and design decisions.
On one hand as Michael replied it may be an intentional “accident”.
On the other hand, a lot of people in the gaming community and see PC Cobbler’s reply in this context, have asked for less Power Management and more performance.
Microsoft may have intentionally designed Windows this way for both reasons mentioned above and also to somehow make the users “feel” that their PCs with Windows 10 are more responsive that those with Windows 7, following the upgrade.
The method provided by me is not mandatory, it is in the “tweaking” category but as you can all see, there is demand for it on the Microsoft’s own community sites.

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CH wrote “I mentioned that it is targeted to those with old motherboards and PCs who are interested to extend the life of their computers few more years after upgrading to Windows 10”

That’s a strange comment given that Intel will never release W-10 graphics device drivers for anything older than Ivy Bridge (3rd Generation Core) which was released in 2012. This position has been offered many times in Intel support forums. And Intel exited the motherboard business and has no intentions of supporting W-10 on them — for example, try and find W-10 device drivers for DZ77SL-50K (launched Q2-2012) or DZ87KLT-75K (launched Q2-2013) on intel.com. Sure, if you know what you are doing, you can cobble some drivers together, but if you run into any trouble, you are on your own. I would not install W-10 on old hardware.

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At one point I had a dual boot setup with a small Haswell-based (Pentium G3220) system.

A while back I played the same UHD video in Media Player and watched CPU temperatures on an otherwise idle bootup of Win 7 and 8.1. As I recall, the processor ran about 10 C hotter to do it under Win 10.

More details on what I measured here:

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/173843-windows-10-runs-hotter-than-windows-7/?do=findComment&comment=1099549

-Noel

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Noel, this may prove the point. However I would expect playing a UHD video to have all cores running at full speed. Maybe not if part of the load is taken by the graphics GPU.
It would be interesting if you have the time and interest in testing the same thing using the High Performance Power Plan under Windows 7. In the default configuration High Performance plans should not park cores and in theory should increase the temperature.
There is also a generally ignored setting, System Cooling Policy which has influence over the CPU performance. On Passive (which is default only on battery but not AC), the CPU is forced to work at lower performance in such a way that the fan is triggered less or triggered at lower speed.
As I don’t really need the full performance of an i7 Gen2 Quad-Core CPU on the laptop, not even when playing videos, I keep the cooling to Passive. As I mentioned before, I tend to set the max CPU to 99% which is a tweak to disable Turbo Mode. This last setting is subject to further testing as there are various opinions about how useful Turbo Mode is in general.

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