Can you shut down cores?

[Primus462]

I've got my 9950 up and running. I've been wanting to do some benchmarking (Crysis CPU benchmark, PCMark Vantage) and I was curious to know if there is a way you can disable 2 of the cores in order to do a comparison between performance with 4 cores and 2 cores. Anyone know?

 

[Primus462]

I found this article where Tom's tested the Phenom earlier this year, but it doesn't say how they forced the CPU to use 1,2,3 or 4 cores. Is it a setting in the benchmark itself?

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a-amd-triple-core-phenom,1783.html

 

[yonef]

They didn't "disable" cores, I think that they forced the certain application to use only 1,2,3 or 4 cores. You can set affinity for apps by opening a task manager and rightclick on the desired process and then choose affinity. This will force apps to use only selected cores.

 

[cjl]

I'm not familiar with AMD, but on my Core i7, in the BIOS, there's an option to set how many cores to run - there is an option for 1, 2, or all.

 

[flyin15sec]

Disabling cores, would be a mother feature. Some have it, others don't.