Hyperthreading!!!! On or off?

[acid1011]

Just got myself an i7 8700k .

Do i keep the hyperthreading on?

Will be using it mostly for games and occasional rendering with Adobe Premiere Pro.

[Lurick]

Yes, definitely keep it on.

[RadiatingLight]

Definitely keep it on. More threads = more better -- there's no downside unless you're running an extremely specific workload only, and even then it would only be 1-2%

 

FYI, Hyperthreading is basically the only difference between the 8600K and 8700K. there's no point in disabling a feature you paid over $100 more for.

[acid1011]

Well as i've said, i will mostly play games on it. 
And most of the sources say that HT has some impact on gaming performance

 

[Lurick]

1 minute ago, acid1011 said:

Well as i've said, i will mostly play games on it. 
And most of the sources say that HT has some impact on gaming performance

 

You're talking about MAYBE a total of 1FPS difference, tops, in some rare cases.

99.9% of the time there will be no difference, or if anything a boost in FPS.

[3 Lions]

Well if you didn't want hyper-threading, why did you buy an i7? 

Edited February 11, 2018 by LinusTechTipsFanFromDarlo

[acid1011]

Okay then.

 

[WereCat]

Why would you buy 8700k if you don't want HT? Makes no sense.

[Oshino Shinobu]

37 minutes ago, acid1011 said:

Well as i've said, i will mostly play games on it. 
And most of the sources say that HT has some impact on gaming performance

 

Hyperthreading generally makes little to no difference in most games. Though more are starting to use it, so it can increase FPS. 

 

Rendering videos will benefit a lot from Hyperthreading. There's no reason to disable it really, having it on is pretty much all positives. 

 

34 minutes ago, LinusTechTipsFanFromDarlo said:

Well if you didn't want hyper-threading, why did you buy an i7? 

 

34 minutes ago, WereCat said:

Why would you buy 8700k if you don't want HT? Makes no sense.

Because there are people that don't know what Hyperthreading does? If all they know is that the 8700K is meant to be better than the 8600K because they were told it was at a store, or just the price, you can't really blame them for not knowing that Hyperthreading is one of the main reasons it's better and more expensive than the 8600K. 

[xg32]

the only reason to turn it off would be if it was overheating for some reason and you are waiting for a capable cooler. It does help modern games by a sizable margin (5-10% for games that uses the threads), It does run warmer with HT on but I wouldn't turning it on and off for everyday tasks. 

 

34 minutes ago, WereCat said:

Why would you buy 8700k if you don't want HT? Makes no sense.

iirc someone was running a binned 8700k at 5.4ghz with HT disabled. Not what I'd do, but it's out there.

[porina]

Basically if you have it, leave it on unless you know why you need to otherwise. For gaming, it is generally beneficial. You'll have to check out testing elsewhere but for modern games it can help with increasing minimum fps even if it doesn't always do much to average fps. On the flip side, there are the occasion where (possibly older) games just want real cores and turning it off might increase performance.

[Sakkura]

28 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Hyperthreading generally makes little to no difference in most games. Though more are starting to use it, so it can increase FPS. 

 

Rendering videos will benefit a lot from Hyperthreading. There's no reason to disable it really, having it on is pretty much all positives. 

Games in general have benefitted from hyperthreading for many years.

 

The only reason you would often see no difference between i5 and i7 is that the games weren't capable of benefitting from more than 4 cores or threads. So 4c/4t performed the same as 4c/8t or 6c/12t etc. - but 2c/4t (old i3) did perform better than 2c/2t (old Pentiums).

[xg32]

35 minutes ago, kk027 said:

Wouldn't a binned 8600K that was overclocked be about the same, though?

only reason i can see is the 12mb L3 vs 9mb, maybe he wants to keep the option for HT open and rather have the extra 100mhz for benchmarks. It's weird lol.

[flibberdipper]

You would be pretty stupid to pay 100 bucks more for hyperthreading just to turn it off, especially since there's no reason to turn it off unless you're trying to go for some kind of XOC record.

[Earthplayer]

I know this is a rather old thread but still one of the first things which comes up with google search for this subject and the information is WRONG.

Hyperthreading on (at least on the 6700k) is great for some programs and useful for things like video editing, packing/unpacking (7-zip etc.) and some other applications but bad for gaming. (with only a couple of exceptions with some very modern titles from 2018/2019)

Read up one of the many tests people did with HT off vs on:

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/gaming-benchmarks-core-i7-6700k-hyperthreading-test.219417/

Most games actually have lower FPS with HT on - on newer (but less rounded) tests from 2018/2019 you can see that even most games which came out 2018/19 still have this issue. (although there are a few more which actually have better performance now, but only by 3-4%) In some games you lose up to 8% of your FPS. To top this off the heat generated by the CPU is worse with HT on which can make it throttle earlier and makes stable OC harder. (my 6700k runs at 4.8 stable with HT off and just 4.6 stable with HT on - repeatable every time I tried - with 4.8 stable the HT off gains even more benefits in most games compared to HT on and the games where HT on used to be better have the same FPS now)

 

--> If you do at least 90% gaming DON'T enable HT unless you know you are only going to play the few games which actually benefit from HT on and you don't want to overclock (why get a 6700k and not a 6700 then though?). Why get the 6700k instead of the 6600k at all if you disable HT? Because so many people told you that it was better to have HT even for gaming and the benefits would just get better with each year as more games support more cores. The reality is different - 2019 and still just 20% of the games benefit from HT while the rest either lose some FPS or have the same FPS with a hotter CPU.

 

Then again, the 6700k won't bottleneck you at anything below 120hz right now. And on some games even 240hz monitors just barely reach the limits of the 6700k. If you enable Vsync or have a FPS limit because you use adaptive sync with 120hz or less, you can enable HT unless you want to overclock. (at least for 6700k or better CPUs right now) If your CPU is almost never a bottleneck at 120hz or below it doesn't matter if you enable HT or not for games. But it WILL benefit you in rendering times for adobe premiere to have it enabled. --> enable HT with a 120hz monitor or less, disable it with 144hz or more. (at least for 4+ core CPUs - with 2 core CPUs ALWAYS enable HT, most games can use 4 cores well since 2018, just more than 4 is still rare)

 

Hope this helps anyone dropping by looking for an answer - especially people who only do gaming and nothing else.