What parking settings should I choose for the i5-13600KF?

[Rijvo]

As per the title, I have no idea what the best parking settings are for the i5-13600KF.

[Jeremy Collake]

Hi Rijvo, welcome!

There isn't one best setting for the 13600KF. It depends on whether you care more about responsiveness or about lower power and heat at idle. Here's a simple way to choose:

1. For gaming or maximum responsiveness, select the Bitsum Highest Performance power plan in ParkControl. It keeps all cores unparked, so the CPU never has to wait for a parked core to wake up.
2. For a good balance, use Dynamic Boost. It switches to Bitsum Highest Performance while you're using the PC and drops back to Balanced when you're idle. For most people this is the best of both worlds.
3. If you mostly care about low power and heat, stay on Balanced and leave its parking settings at their defaults.

On a hybrid chip like yours (6 P-cores and 8 E-cores), Windows 11 already decides which threads go to P-cores and which go to E-cores, so there's no need to fine-tune parking per core type. Pick one of the options above and see how it feels.

If you notice stutters or slowdowns with a particular setup, let us know what you're running and we can look into it.

[Rijvo]

It was about these settings. Should I leave them as they are? I'm asking because I don't know why, after closing a software program, another resource appears that gets "parked"—which causes stuttering in the game FORTNITE.

[Jeremy Collake]

Hi Rijvo,

Thanks for the screenshot. Those settings are fine for gaming, so leave them as they are. Parking is set to Off on AC, so as long as Bitsum Highest Performance is the active power plan, no cores should be parked.

That means if you see cores parking after you close a program, the active power plan is most likely changing at that point. Common causes:

1. Dynamic Boost is enabled in ParkControl. When it thinks the PC is idle, it switches back to Balanced, and Balanced parks cores. For gaming, turn Dynamic Boost off and set Bitsum Highest Performance as the active plan ("Ustaw jako aktywne").
2. Another program changes the power plan when it starts or exits. Examples are Process Lasso Performance Mode or per-app power profiles, a vendor utility (Armoury Crate, MSI Center, Lenovo Vantage, etc.), or some game launchers.
3. Windows reset the plan after an update. Tick "Reapply this profile's settings at ParkControl startup" at the bottom so your settings are restored every time.

It also looks like you're on an older version of ParkControl. Please update to the latest version, either with the update option in the menu or by downloading it from https://bitsum.com/parkcontrol/. Newer builds include fixes and improvements.

Next time it happens, check which plan is active (hover over the ParkControl tray icon, or run powercfg /getactivescheme in a command prompt). If it's no longer Bitsum Highest Performance, tell us which program you had just closed and we'll help track down what's switching it.

If the plan is still Bitsum Highest Performance and you still get stutter, the parking is probably not the cause, and we can look at other things.