Why is my i5-14600KF struggling with thread scheduling?
During high-frequency combo sequences, I noticed my frame times were jumping wildly between 11ms - 38ms, which felt like a nightmare. The E-Cores on my i5-14600KF were aggressively hijacking the main thread, causing the clock speeds to bounce erratically between 3.8GHz - 5.3GHz. I first tried slapping the system into High Performance mode, but while the P-Cores woke up faster, the E-Core interference remained a total mess. I eventually used a process Lasso tool to force the game's main thread onto the P-Cores and disabled several low-power C-states in the BIOS. Checking via RTSS, the frame intervals tightened from 15-35ms down to a rock steady 8-12ms. I actually crashed the game twice at first because I messed up the affinity mask, but once I double-checked the core IDs, it stayed stable. CPU temps sat around 62℃ - 70℃ with a balanced load. After exporting the scheduling profile, my frame times are now consistently 8-12ms.
