RTX 4090 & 53 Games: Core i9-13900K E-Cores Enabled vs Disabled

[L'Eliminateur]

No one force you anything, go with an Intel CPU without e-cores or with AMD or a if the e-cores deter you so much for some reason

The e-cores concept is a wonderful thing and AMD are on the way to adopt them in the future. If not, they will stay behind.

Intel does not have anything without e-cores anymore, at least until now they've said they wouldn't release a p-core only like the 12400.
e-core is an atrocious backwards concept, or a low performance small core, essentially it's an atom or celeron. Sorry but i don't want that in my PC, i've paid for "core i" not a "many core celeron".
Instead of advancing performance, they're selling you an outdated 5+yr old performance core(because e-cores are 1st gen skylake levels of performance) as "something good and fresh", not sorry i'm not going to partake in the corporate kool-aid.

And yes, i will go to AMD because i want my computer to have the best performance our of all current CPUs

In general, I don't trust OS CPU schedulers when it comes to oddities. AMD chips can have two or more CCDs that the scheduler has to properly balance and devide up threads froma single application, and Intel now has big.LITTLE with the P and E cores the scheduler needs to properly balance. Sometimes you win sometimes you lose. AMD likely has similar numbers of some games doing better and some worse if you disable a CCD.

People love E cores because they can do background tasks or crank out some very parallel threaded work. What I say to that, remove those E cores and just give me more P cores. Intel could have easily given us 12P cores on a smaller die or go slightly larger and given us 14P cores. Or even 12P cores and still fit in say 4 Ecores. Makes me feel like this is primarily for Intel to be able to compete at the core count level against AMD, where with the 13th Generation Intel has the upper hand here.

Efficiency is important, but I don't think this P+E layout is really delivering here. It doesn't seem to be giving the 12th or 13th gen cores an edge in anyway. Maybe they are helping to keep Intel's numbers from exploding if all they did was offer P cores?

AMD should have a vNUMA mode like they have on servers, so each CCD acts like a NUMA node and scheduler treats them more separate, because since AMD did not add inter-CCD IF like i na rong, the CCD to CCD latency is terrible passing through the IOD.

And yes, intel should've made a p-ore only 12+ core CPU, or at least a 8 core pure p-core only with no thread director rubbish hardware

 

[bug]

Intel does not have anything without e-cores anymore, at least until now they've said they wouldn't release a p-core only like the 12400.
e-core is an atrocious backwards concept, or a low performance small core, essentially it's an atom or celeron. Sorry but i don't want that in my PC, i've paid for "core i" not a "many core celeron".
Instead of advancing performance, they're selling you an outdated 5+yr old performance core(because e-cores are 1st gen skylake levels of performance) as "something good and fresh", not sorry i'm not going to partake in the corporate kool-aid.

And yes, i will go to AMD because i want my computer to have the best performance our of all current CPUs


AMD should have a vNUMA mode like they have on servers, so each CCD acts like a NUMA node and scheduler treats them more separate, because since AMD did not add inter-CCD IF like i na rong, the CCD to CCD latency is terrible passing through the IOD.

And yes, intel should've made a p-ore only 12+ core CPU, or at least a 8 core pure p-core only with no thread director rubbish hardware

Except it's not an Atom or a Celeron, Alder Lake's E-cores were almost as powerful as a Skylake core.

 

[Dirt Chip]

Intel does not have anything without e-cores anymore, at least until now they've said they wouldn't release a p-core only like the 12400.
e-core is an atrocious backwards concept, or a low performance small core, essentially it's an atom or celeron. Sorry but i don't want that in my PC, i've paid for "core i" not a "many core celeron".
Instead of advancing performance, they're selling you an outdated 5+yr old performance core(because e-cores are 1st gen skylake levels of performance) as "something good and fresh", not sorry i'm not going to partake in the corporate kool-aid.

And yes, i will go to AMD because i want my computer to have the best performance our of all current CPUs


AMD should have a vNUMA mode like they have on servers, so each CCD acts like a NUMA node and scheduler treats them more separate, because since AMD did not add inter-CCD IF like i na rong, the CCD to CCD latency is terrible passing through the IOD.

And yes, intel should've made a p-ore only 12+ core CPU, or at least a 8 core pure p-core only with no thread director rubbish hardware

But the e cores cpu give you more pref in most cases.More than AMD except spacific games when using 5800x3d.
Thise 'lesser' cores give you more pref and cost less.
Why are you so offended by them? Because they are "weak" comper to the P cores? It makes you feel that your comp is slower or weaker dispite clear multipal benchmarks?

This wrong assumptions might make you purchase a product that give you less pref or cost more for no good reason.It may very well be tha an AMD is the right for you, but not because "e cores are fake cores, just PR cores" or any other sort of nonsense about them.

 

[Haru]

Thanks a lot for the test!

Now I'd love to see what fps percentiles look like with e-cores en- and disabled.

I remember that star citizen HEAVILY profited of e-cores being disabled and frame drops/microstutters in Forza Horizon 5 were gone after disabling e-cores with my 12900k under Win 10.

This test might also be nice to see using Win11 so we can actually see the improvements the new scheduler gives us.

 

[L'Eliminateur]

But the e cores cpu give you more pref in most cases.More than AMD except spacific games when using 5800x3d.
Thise 'lesser' cores give you more pref and cost less.
Why are you so offended by them? Because they are "weak" comper to the P cores? It makes you feel that your comp is slower or weaker dispite clear multipal benchmarks?

This wrong assumptions might make you purchase a product that give you less pref or cost more for no good reason.It may very well be tha an AMD is the right for you, but not because "e cores are fake cores, just PR cores" or any other sort of nonsense about them.

those lesser cores don't give ME any performance, i'm not going to pay for a intel PR stunt as you say, even less when it "forces" me to use a trash unwanted OS like win11.
It doesn't make me "feel", they ARE slower, i don't care about cinebench benchmarks(after all, e-cores are called "cinebench accelerators"), i only want true homogeneous processing cores, simple, maximum performance, minimum latency for everything.
E-cores might be fine for laptops, not for a PC, i'm not buying into intel marketing bullshit, so even if AMD is wildly more expensive, intel pretty much guaranteed i'm never going to buy them again

 

[bug]

It doesn't make me "feel", they ARE slower, i don't care about cinebench benchmarks(after all, e-cores are called "cinebench accelerators"), i only want true homogeneous processing cores, simple, maximum performance, minimum latency for everything.

Well, then you have a real problem buying any CPU, because AMD won't give you "minimum latency for everything" either: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1758...ryzen-5-7600x-review-retaking-the-high-end/10

 

[L'Eliminateur]

Well, then you have a real problem buying any CPU, because AMD won't give you "minimum latency for everything" either: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1758...ryzen-5-7600x-review-retaking-the-high-end/10

AMD does give me the mininum latency because they have only one kind of good core, exactly as shown in the anandtech link (latencies are high only if you have a two CCD model)

 

[bug]

AMD does give me the mininum latency because they have only one kind of good core, exactly as shown in the anandtech link (latencies are high only if you have a two CCD model)

And if you need many cores, you do have a two CCD model.

 

[Dirt Chip]

those lesser cores don't give ME any performance, i'm not going to pay for a intel PR stunt as you say, even less when it "forces" me to use a trash unwanted OS like win11.
It doesn't make me "feel", they ARE slower, i don't care about cinebench benchmarks(after all, e-cores are called "cinebench accelerators"), i only want true homogeneous processing cores, simple, maximum performance, minimum latency for everything.
E-cores might be fine for laptops, not for a PC, i'm not buying into intel marketing bullshit, so even if AMD is wildly more expensive, intel pretty much guaranteed i'm never going to buy them again

Good for you mate, you knowingly loosing potential preformance and maybe paying more for it just to hurt Intel.
Enjoy the rest of your carusade against them, tell us in the end what was the outcome and at what cost.

 

[L'Eliminateur]

i'm knowingly GAINING performance by going AMD, i don't need processes running on outdated gimped cores that's why i'm buying a NEW computer, not a i5-6000-filled-"new"-cpu or an atom/celeron.
And again, i won't run win11 nor use e-cores, so to "waste" money on a cpu i'll disable more than half it's "features" is pointless

 

[demi9od]

Thanks a lot for the test!

Now I'd love to see what fps percentiles look like with e-cores en- and disabled.

I remember that star citizen HEAVILY profited of e-cores being disabled and frame drops/microstutters in Forza Horizon 5 were gone after disabling e-cores with my 12900k under Win 10.

This test might also be nice to see using Win11 so we can actually see the improvements the new scheduler gives us.

Frame time consistency and the frequency of worst case scenario dips is really all I am interested in at this point in PC gaming benchmarks. 200fps vs 120fps average doesn't really matter to me, anything over 100 is good enough. But those frame time spikes up to 40ms? You will notice those every single time.

 

[mab1376]

I'd be curious to see vs a 12900k to see if there's any bottlenecking.

 

[Wolverine2349]

Very very interesting, with e-cores disabled, ¿wouldn't a 13900k be essentially the same as a i7-13700k?, save for some minor clock differences that can be shaved away by overclocking and 6MB of more L3 (i7 has 5.4g max vs 5.8G but both have the same max turbo p core of 5.4, the rest is tb 3.0 or IVB).

If you don't want to use E-cores you could save a ton of money by going to an i7 and overclocking the snot out of it.

A permanently disabled i7 platform with DDR5 is very enticing price-wise

Well you get more L3 cache on 13900K and that matters.

Thanks for the exhaustive testings, I tried disabling E-cores in Spiderman Remastered and get worse frametimes consistency (Win11), I guess E-cores have its uses despite some people claim it to be e-waste cores.

Thats in WIN11.

Core i7-12700K review revealing that E-cores hurt P-cores, but without them, everything is only worse

A review of the Core i7-12700K reveals that the presence of E-cores negatively impacts the performance of P-cores, but without them, the overall performance is even worse.

fox-laptop.com

Disabling e-cores per the thread above actually hurts performance in WIN11 as it is thread director aware and the thread director will misallocate hyper threaded threads to logical vs physical cores. So you need at least 1 e-core enabled in WIN11 as there is no way to disable thread director in WIN11 on Alder Lake or Raptor Lake CPU

With WIN10, it is not thread director aware so having e-cores disabled will not at all hurt gaming performance and can only help it as WIN10 treats an Alder Lake or Raptor Lake as a normal 8 core 16 thread CPU when all e-cores are disabled.

E-cores in WIN10 are way better left off for gaming.

In WIN11 for anything one needs to be on or the issues above until the day comes where the thread director can be disabled on 12th and 13th Gen CPUs in WIN11.

 

[L'Eliminateur]

Well you get more L3 cache on 13900K and that matters.




Thats in WIN11.

Core i7-12700K review revealing that E-cores hurt P-cores, but without them, everything is only worse

A review of the Core i7-12700K reveals that the presence of E-cores negatively impacts the performance of P-cores, but without them, the overall performance is even worse.

fox-laptop.com

Disabling e-cores per the thread above actually hurts performance in WIN11 as it is thread director aware and the thread director will misallocate hyper threaded threads to logical vs physical cores. So you need at least 1 e-core enabled in WIN11 as there is no way to disable thread director in WIN11 on Alder Lake or Raptor Lake CPU

With WIN10, it is not thread director aware so having e-cores disabled will not at all hurt gaming performance and can only help it as WIN10 treats an Alder Lake or Raptor Lake as a normal 8 core 16 thread CPU when all e-cores are disabled.

E-cores in WIN10 are way better left off for gaming.

In WIN11 for anything one needs to be on or the issues above until the day comes where the thread director can be disabled on 12th and 13th Gen CPUs in WIN11.

that's an excellent site you linked, and -not that it was needed- another reason to avoid winblows11 and intel e-waste altogether.
Or a least buy a i7-13700, disable the e-waste and keep using it in win10 as corrrectly intended for maximum performance in all workloads

 

[Wolverine2349]

that's an excellent site you linked, and -not that it was needed- another reason to avoid winblows11 and intel e-waste altogether.
Or a least buy a i3-13700, disable the e-waste and keep using it in win10 as corrrectly intended for maximum performance in all workloads

Thats exactly what I have my 13900K as. E-waste cores off and overclocked to 5.6GHz all P cores. Gaming beast CPU.

And yes I stay on Windows 10 and hate WIN11 for more reasons than that as well.

Plus better thermals too as no extra e-cores taking up more power and heat on a dual tower air cooler. Of course P cores take up more power and heat than e-cores, but e-cores alone take up plenty and shutting them down gives much more thermal and power headroom. Of course you could disable the P cores and use only e-=cores then you just gimped CPU so severely and have a poor man's at best dual 9700K in 13900K's case or single 9700K in 13700K's case CPU with much worse latency and thus much worse performance core for core clock for clock than a real 9700K.

 

[Wirko]

Core i7-12700K review revealing that E-cores hurt P-cores, but without them, everything is only worse

A review of the Core i7-12700K reveals that the presence of E-cores negatively impacts the performance of P-cores, but without them, the overall performance is even worse.

fox-laptop.com

Disabling e-cores per the thread above actually hurts performance in WIN11 as it is thread director aware and the thread director will misallocate hyper threaded threads to logical vs physical cores. So you need at least 1 e-core enabled in WIN11 as there is no way to disable thread director in WIN11 on Alder Lake or Raptor Lake CPU

With WIN10, it is not thread director aware so having e-cores disabled will not at all hurt gaming performance and can only help it as WIN10 treats an Alder Lake or Raptor Lake as a normal 8 core 16 thread CPU when all e-cores are disabled.

E-cores in WIN10 are way better left off for gaming.

Great article at fox-laptop, thanks. But it doesn't have a date, it seems old, probably written soon after ADL was launched.

Windows 10 is also getting wiser, supposedly (I don't have the means for testing that). You need 22H2 and/or you must choose the High Performance power plan, then E-cores work quite well. Have you tried that?

(Caution, the article at hwcooling.net is a bit confused, it says 22H2 in the title but it should be 21H2.)

 

[Wolverine2349]

Great article at fox-laptop, thanks. But it doesn't have a date, it seems old, probably written soon after ADL was launched.

Windows 10 is also getting wiser, supposedly (I don't have the means for testing that). You need 22H2 and/or you must choose the High Performance power plan, then E-cores work quite well. Have you tried that?

(Caution, the article at hwcooling.net is a bit confused, it says 22H2 in the title but it should be 21H2.)

I have not and have no interest in it as I do not care for the hybrid arch and hate the e-cores and just like the P cores.

I run Windows 10 LTSC 21H2 version 2021.

I have e-cores disabled, so no fear of losing performance for it not being aware

The point of the article was about WIN11 and how you cold gimp performance of even the P cores with e-cores off because of the thread director and it misallocates thread to virtual cores instead of physical ones and there is no way to disable the thread director and thus WIN11 will be worse without the e-cores.

Since WIN10 at least version 21H2 and lower have no awareness of thread director, you can safely disable the e-cores and have a normal 8 core 16 thread CPU that it works with as well as any other 8 core 16 thread CPU.

WIN11 would be the same if only thread director could be disabled. Its just that the thread director is always active and no way to shut it off so problems disabling e-cores as thread director expects e cores to be there. Not at all an issue on WIN10.

 

[D007]

Very nice review, thank you.
My question would be in Win 11, perhaps leave 2 Ecores on, disable the rest and use that headroom to OC the PCores. Then would that end in better gaming performance?
I mean you’re looking at what? An all PCore 6.0 or higher OC perhaps, while still leaving some Ecores on for functionality? Hmmmmm.

 

[L'Eliminateur]

Very nice review, thank you.
My question would be in Win 11, perhaps leave 2 Ecores on, disable the rest and use that headroom to OC the PCores. Then would that end in better gaming performance?
I mean you’re looking at what? An all PCore 6.0 or higher OC perhaps, while still leaving some Ecores on for functionality? Hmmmmm.

AFAIK you can't disable a random numbers of cores

 

[bug]

AFAIK you can't disable a random numbers of cores

You can. The number of active cores is editable, you can input whatever value you want. What you can't do is enter 0 for the number of enabled P cores.

 

[Wolverine2349]

You can. The number of active cores is editable, you can input whatever value you want. What you can't do is enter 0 for the number of enabled P cores.

Yes true on al Intel CPUs.

On AMD CPUs I believe you cannot disable any cores on single CCD CPU from Zen 3 and newer You can however on a dual CCD CPU like the Ryzen 9 parts disable one CCD. Someone correct me if I am wrong on that.

I am going to go with a 7700X I am pretty sure now after selling off my parts.

Power consumption much lower and have a CPU with 8 cores and no need to disable parts I do not want. And only single CCD so no cross CCD latency. Will probably get 7800X3D once it is released.

 

[Mussels]

You can definitely disable cores on AM4, but it came at some cost (I think Cstates were disabled and possibly SMT)

 

[Wolverine2349]

You can definitely disable cores on AM4, but it came at some cost (I think Cstates were disabled and possibly SMT)

You can actually disable individual cores on AMD not just a CCD?

 

[Mussels]

You can actually disable individual cores on AMD not just a CCD?

Yeah, since x370
It's always been available
You need to read it in the counts voice, however

 

[Wolverine2349]

It would be nice to see 1% and 0.1% lows as average FPS does not tell the whole story.

On Red Dead Redemption 2, e-cores on at least in WIN10 gave same maximum and average FPS, but 13% worse minimum FPS for me.