C-states
Also searched as: c-states · c states · cstates · cpu idle states
What it means
The low-power sleep levels your CPU drops idle cores into between bursts of work. A popular tweak says to turn them off "for consistency."
More detail
Leave them on. Modern boost works by borrowing the power budget freed up by sleeping cores to push the busy cores faster — switch C-states off and you raise heat and actually lower your peak boost. This is one of the tweaks that backfires on the people who apply it.
The Compy Blackbook holds 174 graded entries like this one, judged against your hardware — and every change it does make is reversible, with the receipt to prove it.
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