If you are an owner of a new multicore Intel CPU for example Intel core I7 and Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 OS, you already might notice that some of the cores in your resource monitor are marked as parked. This is a new feature of windows 7/2008 operating system that is made to balance energy consumption by your CPU. So let’s say if you are performing some tasks that do not consume a lot of CPU power, all the cores that are parked will remain in that state. However, if you are running something that requires a lot of CPU power, all the cores, which were previously parked, will be placed in the active state (unparked) to perform the task. And after it’s done, they will be parked again.

 

All in all, this is a nice feature to save the energy. But if you decide to keep all of your cores active at all times, there is no way to disable CPU parking from the user interface or by running command prompt.

 

While searching the internet, I could not find any utility that will allow you to enable and disable the CPU parking without having to go and modify the registry manually. So I decided to write one.

 

This utility will allow you to easily enable or disable core parking for your CPU. The first thing that you should do is to go to a resource manager to check if you have parked cores. The reason of doing so is that core parking is not enabled for all the multicore CPU’s. For example, if you have Intel Q9550 Quad Core CPU you may not see any parked cores at all.

 

http://www.coderbag.com/Programming-C/Disable-CPU-Core-Parking-Utility

I would think that this is an advanced power feature that could be turned off in the bios. Don't have a CPU that does it so I dunno.

Would be useful if you're trying to overclock and stress test.

This isn't for AMD chips correct?  I have a 6 core AMD 1100T Thuban Black edition in mine.  Don't want to fubar anything.

Sounds like it's just a registry change. I doubt it would hurt if you disabled it and it wasn't being used.

So I checked this out and turns out 3 of my 6 cores were "parked".  I unparked everything but I'm not entirely sure how to gauge how much of a difference it will really make in the long run lol.