How to turn on Hyperthreading?

[wolfz]

I'm running a MS-6577 Rev 2.1, MSI P4 motherboard with a 845G chipset. It's supposed to be able to "hyperthread". What do I have to do to turn this feature on??

 

[mighty_chick]

it will automatically come on when its needed and stop when its not, you wont even know its working

 

[ownage]

you turn it on in the BIOS i think. Im not very familiar with Pentium 4's.

 

[mighty_chick]

oh maybe but i thought it was always on whenever a program could take advantage of it..

 

[ownage]

but you can also disable it throught the BIOS. Believe it or not, some programs run slower with HyperThreading.

 

[jac006]

thats freakin hilarious... which is why i really want an amd right now... desktop that is. 3800+ baby.

 

[Dishdog]

thers an option to turn HT on or off in your BIOS

 

[Kage]

Yeah these are right in saying you'll be able to turn it off/on in bios.

What i'm a bit confused by is the remark by Ownage that it could slow programs down.
I'd assume that it would only use the virtual processors if a program used it, and wouldn't be used at all if its not supported by a program. I'd also assume that running a program that supported it would use the virtual processors and so speed the processes up...

Surely this wouldn't cause issues? I'm not questioning you by the way, i'm just wondering (i have an AMD so isn't biased either to question you)

 

[ownage]

I heard from people say that it does but havent really tried it myself. I too have an AMD. Maybe ill try it on my friends computer. The problem is, i dont know what programs it runs slower on with HT. Anybody got any ideas?

 

[Kage]

Hmm, i'd be very surprised if the slow down was noticable. Maybe if it was compared using a benchmark test then yeah, which might have been how it was found out, so isn't really that accurate, just like 3D Mark isn't exactly accurate.

If a program support HT, and it's running, I wouldn't expect anything less than a boost