Potential problems caused by disabling hyperthreading?

[Duckmeister]

My computer specs are:

Asus P6T
Intel Core i7 920 @3.2Ghz
ATI Radeon HD 5970
Corsair 6GB DDR3 @ 1333Mhz
Corsair 850HX PSU

running Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium.

My 920 uses hyperthreading, and since I don't have any applications that use more than four cores, it was recommended to me that I disable hyperthreading for a slight performance boost in CPU-intensive games such as ArmA 2 and Bad Company 2.

My question is: can I turn hyperthreading off without having any sort of negative repercussions? I obviously installed Windows with it on, is there any chance of creating problems by turning it off?

Thanks in advance.

 

[d1rtyju1c3]

HT mght decrease performance in some games but the decrease is minimal. I play my games with it on with no issues. While turning HT off may increase performance, at this point it wont hurt it. So no turning HT off will not hurt anything, and it may or may not increase performance.

 

[Duckmeister]

Thanks for the answer.

Yeah, I had researched whether it would actually help my performance or not, and for most games it's quite minimal, but for games like ArmA 2 I've heard that the increase might be a bit more significant.

What I really need to know is whether disabling hyperthreading will cause any problems, whether with the OS, or anything.

 

[d1rtyju1c3]

No, disabling hyperthreading will not cause any problems with your OS or anything else.

 

[ElMoIsEviL]

I've actually noticed an increase in performance with HT on under Bad Company 2 but then again I'm using a Tri-Fire setup which does require my cards to be fed constant data to render.

 

[gamerk316]

It is VERY unlikely HT will cause a performance drop, unless the program in question is VERY math heavy (ALU bottleneck on the logical cores). As such, most people leave HT on and forget about it.

 

[Duckmeister]

Best answer selected by Duckmeister.

 

[Duckmeister]

Thank you all for your answers, I really appreciate your help.

ElMo, that's quite an amazing rig you've got there, although I can't help but think you should've gone with quad-fire, especially with Catalyst 10.7+ offering extremely improved quad-fire support.

Gamerk, that's what I've been doing for about a year now, but recently I've noticed some ArmA 2 players strongly recommending others to disable hyperthreading, and that's a game I've had some performance issues with.

Hey, as long as there's no harm involved, I'm game for trying, so I'm off to the BIOS to disable it right now! Thanks again.

 

[d1rtyju1c3]

No problem, let us know how it goes. [:bohleyk:1]

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey