As suspected, you don't have a hardware problem, you have a game that's barfing on your CPU topology. There's a good chance restricting the cores to the 8 p-cores with Affinity settings will make the game playable.
How you do this depends on whether or not the game can tolerate being broken out of to get task manager up. The easiest way in Windows is to right click on the running game process in task manager and choose Affinity and check boxes for the cores. Try it like that first if you can.
If that helps, the other way is to launch it with cmd.exe/start.exe with the /affinity switch in a batch file (this won't work in a normal desktop shortcut unless run through cmd.exe), but it's a hexadecimal bitmask that has to be added.
Code: Select all
start /affinity 0x00000000000001FF "c:\path to\stupid fucking\game program.exe"
(I hope quotes work for spaces... should, it's not actually "DOS")
In a shortcut:
Code: Select all
c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe /C start /affinity 0x00000000000001FF "c:\path to\stupid fucking\game program.exe"
I say stupid fucking game because it pisses me off that we have to do things like this. I have a few games I have to do that for on my new rig (we have taskset on Linux, as well as a variable for Wine that works similarly). My Deadspace 2 game for one example. High on Life is another that has problems on the new rig.
Here's a calculator:
https://bitsum.com/tools/cpu-affinity-calculator/
That mask in my commands was calculated there, by checking cores 0 through 8. Experiment with those if that doesn't work, for we really don't know which cores are which.
