In mid-October we shared a guide on building a low-power eco-friendly computer. With the right parts you can have a relatively powerful and efficient desktop system, but if you want to go in the other direction to do some overclocking and not sacrifice performance, you will need to do two things: first, disable all power-saving modes for your processor, and second, enable the Ultimate Performance plan hidden in Windows 10.
How to activate the Ultimate Performance power plan in Windows 10
If you are overclocking your computer, power saving is not a priority, and honestly, it never will be. You want to squeeze every core, reach the frequency limits of your graphics card, and tweak RAM latencies to get even the last FPS. On the other hand, disabling power-saving modes can help achieve greater stability in certain configurations. Some old BIOSes without available updates do not do a good job, and the same extends to drivers of dubious quality. Even USB ports can stop working due to half-baked power management. Regardless of your situation, you might want to know that Windows 10 hides a power plan called “Ultimate Performance”, which we can enable easily.
All you have to do is open a console with administrator privileges and paste this command:
powercfg -duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61
That is it. The system does not even need to be restarted. Go to the classic Control Panel, enter Power Options, and choose Ultimate Performance from the list of additional plans. Under this plan, hard drives never stop, the JavaScript timer frequency is at maximum, hibernation and sleep are disabled (although you can suspend manually), and everything related to processor management is taken to its peak, including minimum and maximum states, and the cooling policy.
Now, does this translate into a performance improvement? Not necessarily. Some users see it almost as a clone of High Performance, but others swear by its effectiveness on computers with SLI configuration. One more detail: you must be on at least Windows 10 1803 for the plan to appear. If you do not want power saving to interfere, or need to disable certain modes for stability reasons, do not hesitate to give it a try.
