Disabling SMT / Hyper-Threading for gaming
Also searched as: disable hyperthreading · disable smt · smt off · hyperthreading off · fewer cores faster
What it does
Turning off your CPU's second thread per core (Hyper-Threading on Intel, SMT on AMD) in BIOS, on the theory that fewer, 'cleaner' threads game better.
The honest verdict
On almost any modern 6-plus-core CPU this is a step backwards or a wash — you hand the game fewer threads to spread across and leave background work fighting it for what's left. The idea comes from ancient quad-cores that genuinely choked on thread count, a problem today's CPUs don't have. There is one honest exception: a narrow set of specific, heavily CPU-bound titles has measured a small gain with it off — so it isn't literally nothing everywhere, but that's the rare case, not the rule, and you'd be giving up thread headroom in everything else to chase it. Don't assume either way: change the one thing and watch your own 1% low. Compy never touches BIOS core settings.
How Compy treats it
Compy won't recommend it. If you're curious anyway: change one thing at a time, measure it on your own rig, and revert unless it's clearly better — that loop is exactly what Compy is built around.
The Compy Blackbook holds 191 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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