Turning off cores might help lower temperatures on your 9700k.
Turning off cores might help lower temperatures on your 9700k.
Your 9700k is running on stock cooling with Noctua NH-U12s. You're considering reducing the number of active cores from all 8 to 4.9 to see if it improves performance. Since games don't use every core, disabling a few might help lower temperatures and allow better heat management for the remaining cores. Yes, this could potentially help the cooler handle the reduced workload more effectively.
You understand that boosting overclocking aims to enhance system speed, and turning off cores wouldn’t improve performance? You could say, “I’m not concerned with multiple cores; I just need a single-core setup for gaming.” But in reality, your FPS is probably limited by the GPU anyway.
For instance, playing CSGO in a quad setup can significantly lower temperatures. It might also cause a slight performance boost.
Temperatures need to drop a bit. Turning off cores will only push performance down to around 100MHz at most, which isn't really beneficial. With a 9700K that's powerful, you'll hit a ceiling around 4.8-5.0GHz, but if you get lucky with a good gold version, you might reach 5.1-5.3GHz.