 Hyper-threading is a feature that's been on high-end Intel CPUs for a long time, but has often been misunderstood by the community almost as a whole. Today we're going to check out how actually it works on a Windows level, how applications are interacting with it, and what happens when you put load on actual threads. The MasterCase 5 by Cooler Master gives you the freedom to truly make your mid-tower PC case your own with a variety of modular parts and accessories. Check out the link in the video description to learn more. Many people are vaguely aware that hyper-threading improves performance of certain applications by making one CPU core behave as two so it can split the workload up more effectively. But how does it work exactly? Many people seem to assume that there's a difference between real cores and hyper-threaded cores. I mean it makes sense right? Once you get into your system Windows is going to see eight if you have eight hyper-threaded cores and then some of them will probably be weaker than others. Is that really how it works? I mean Intel's own specs can be a bit confusing. Core i7s usually have four and then in brackets eight listed as their number of cores. Does that mean that there are four subordinate cores or something? Are the four extra cores weaker? To start answering things instead of just repeatedly asking questions for the entire video open up Device Manager on any system that has an i7 in it or a hyper-threaded CPU. You'll see that all of the cores in the current case of this system the 4790k it displays eight CPUs all of which show as the same thing. That's because there is eight logical cores in the system. When you read Intel's spec sheet the four is for physical cores the eight is for what those physical cores result in which is eight logical cores. That doesn't mean you have 12 cores that doesn't mean you have eight cores physically that means you have four cores physically and eight cores logically. Different things they don't add together very different things. So how do these cores actually behave? To find out we use Unraid to set up two Windows virtual machines. We signed each VM four logical cores out of eight total. Then we ran some benchmarks to see if Windows actually cares whether which logical core it's using and to see if there's any preference between them if one of them's actually better than the other one. Some people on forums seem to be under the impression that half of them like 0, 1, 2, and 3 in terms of cores are real cores and half of them 4, 5, 6, and 7 are just the the extra hyper threads. So we're going to see how that works. Results showed virtually no difference. Cinebench got between 620 and 625 per VM when we ran them separately. When we ran them both at the same time they both got exactly 383. So it looks like there's a bit of a performance hit even though the VM completely separates its logical cores. But at the end of the day the performance was the same. Similar story on City Skylines which is a fairly CPU bound game. Both got 48 FPS when running separately with the performance dropping to 35 and 31. We ran them at the same time so there was the difference but not a huge one. And due to City Skylines not being our most consistent benchmark it might come down to just slightly differences within the game. We looked at it much more deeply with 7-Zip running it simultaneously on both VMs gave nearly identical results between 11k and 12k MIPS but when we ran it on just one it jumped to 17k to or 18k MIPS. Starting one first and then starting the other one a while later while it was running allowed us to see this balancing in real time. It was interesting to watch as the processes were running the one you started first would be running faster at the beginning but over time they would start to equal out and it didn't actually take that long. These results seem to make sense as hyperthreading works by sending threads to whatever the physical core actually has free to process instructions. It doesn't split the physical cores into two things and leave the other half unutilized. So if you have just one thing running it will perform better than if you have two running. What's actually happening is that Windows can schedule two different threads on one physical core at the same time. If the physical core is working on the first task but still has some resources free it can go ahead and use its remaining resources to process the second task. So you won't always have a clean doubling or halving of performance if you're running one thing versus two but you will see substantial performance differences if you're leveraging the hyperthreading feature on a physical core. But there is no real distinction to draw between the logical cores on a hyperthreading CPU. They're all the same thing both physically and how a hyperthreading aware OS like Windows 10 sees them. So no it's not the same thing as having eight physical cores like at all but it can be a good way to make sure your CPU cycles don't go to waste. Hopefully that was interesting I'm sure there will be more questions. Basically the gist of it is you don't have eight cores but you have a much more effective way to utilize the four that you do have. Today we're highlighting the K7XX limited edition ruby red headphones from Massdrop. Of course Massdrop still has a bunch of other cool products which you can check out in the link in the video description also. And hopefully you guys know about Massdrop by now but if not the concept is actually pretty simple. The more people commit to purchase a certain product the lower the price of that product actually goes. The product we're showcasing today is the same spec wise as the K7XX headphones that Linus reviewed last year. You can check that video out up here. The only real difference is that this run uses red accents on the earcups and headband. Remember that this is a limited drop so if you want a pair you're gonna have to act pretty fast. These headphones were configured by Massdrop and manufactured by AKG. They're open backed headphones with large cushiony earcups. They feature a flat wire voice coil, VeroMotion two layer diaphragm, genuine leather headband, memory foam ear pads with velour covering, a two-year warranty covered by Massdrop, and you can order outside the US but a $25 fee will be assessed to all international orders. So if you want to check them out and grab a pair of ruby red K7XX headphones head over to the link in the video description today. Anyways let me know what you guys thought about it. Comments down below. Don't forget to like it if you thought I did a good job. Dislike it if you thought I did do a bad job but don't forget to leave the constructive criticism down below. I would like to know what I can do to be better. Also be sure to subscribe if you want to see more of our videos. Use our Amazon affiliate code to buy stuff because like that's cool. I don't know that's pretty awesome. Also we have shirts not this one but they're in the link in the description down below. You can check out some shirts that we have. Those are also pretty cool and we have a forum that's like awesome and has new software on it and looks super cool and like works better and stuff and we're still making tweaks to it. There's definitely some things that can still be improved. This store is a little a little broken. That's my bad. Anyways check out this video. There's more information up there about like cool computer stuff. I haven't picked one yet but it'll be cool. Darren put something cool up there. Feel free to put your own video. Okay bye.