Unparking cores on laptop

[shad0wboss]

So i have i7 3610qm. I was told by many people that unparking cores would improve performance of the cpu specially in gaming.

I was wondering whether it would have any effect on the life of the cores or battery life when the laptop isn't plugged in?

 

[BSim500]

It won't affect battery life that much still they'll still downclock/undervolt using Speedstep when idle. It's worth disabling "core parking" on an i7 due to a bug in Windows 7 on i3 & i7 (but not i5) chips that tried to park hyper-threaded "cores" and then doesn't unpark them in some apps. Read this:-
http://bitsum.com/about_cpu_core_parking.php

I experienced this on an old i3 Clarkdale - In WinRAR it got 2,924kb/s Parking enabled (windows default) but 3,609kb/s Parking disabled! If it parks your HT "cores" and doesn't unpark them, it essentially turns i7's into i5's and i3's into Pentiums. It doesn't happen on all apps / games, but WinRAR is notorious for being one.