If your old laptop needs a little more power, there is an easy solution that most people ignore: performance settings.
These settings reside on most laptops, usually through a preinstalled utility. The vast majority of laptop users never browse around – and you shouldn’t have to, if all you do on your laptop is email, web browsing and conventional productivity apps. But if you want to try a little light game, or if you’re messing with Twitch streaming or video production, you can unlock a free performance boost with a simple click of the mouse or button.
While we encourage you to take advantage of this free performance, note that tweaking these settings does not turn a 4-core CPU into an 8-core CPU. It does not turn a low-end GPU into a high-end GPU. Still, you can find decent performance gains if you try these settings.
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Why the default setting is not maximum performance
There are a few good reasons why manufacturers don’t set a laptop as the default to provide you with the best performance every time. Laptops are very limited in the amount of energy they can provide, as well as the heat they can withstand. These limitations must then be balanced against what the customer wants. Some want less fan noise, while others want the body to remain very cool.
Most vendors share the difference and choose a standard configuration that balances performance with low operating temperatures. This means that there is usually some performance potential that you can exploit through the settings.
IDGThe Gigabyte utility allows you to prioritize CPU or GPU performance separately.
How much performance can you get for free?
If you tweak these settings, performance dividends can range from good to excellent.
Consider an old MSI Prestige 14 aimed at content creators. Your 10th generation Core i7-10710U is a low power chip, so it will never be a barn burner. However, if you change it from its ready-to-use “Balanced” configuration to “High Performance”, you will see a 10% increase in performance in general use of PCMark 10. When creating digital content from PCMark 10, the configuration of high performance offers an improvement of about 15.5 percent.
Performance benefits vary depending on the task. Give the same MSI Prestige 14 a CPU-intensive HandBrake video encoding and switch to High Performance, and it takes 30 percent less time to run. This is a good increase.
IDGOn Dell XPS laptops, you can increase performance in Dell Power Manager.
Much of what you get depends on how much space the manufacturer has incorporated into the laptop. For example, in the standard configurations, the old Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo gaming laptop, with its Core i9-10980HK and GeForce RTX 2080 Super Max-Q, offers an average performance result in UL’s 3DMark Time Spy Graphics test. Set it to Turbo and it will perform 29% faster on the same test.
There are some tasks where you will see very little difference, but getting a 10% to 30% improvement in most cases simply by choosing the laptop’s performance setting is not at all negligible.
IDGThe Acer Predator Triton 500 allows you to access performance profiles simply by pressing the key with the Predator icon or by pressing the Turbo button.
How to access this ‘free’ performance
Many laptops require searching the vendor’s utility to find the performance setting. The MSI is called Dragon Center. The one from the Acer Predator line of games is called Predator Sense. Asus keeps it at Armory Crate. Dell hosts the XPS line configurations in the Power Manager utility.
Some laptop vendors make this as clear as day. The Predator Triton 500 from Acer provides a Predator key with the logo to access the utility and a clearly labeled Turbo button that increases fan speed and GPU performance. The Xenia 15 from XPG has a button that allows you to switch between three performance profiles.
Is a higher performance configuration safe?
There is no need to worry about the security of trying these predefined performance settings on your laptop. While running a CPU or GPU at higher speeds on a desktop – a process known as overclocking – may indeed have its risks, the settings you will find in a vendor’s utility have been tested and will not take your laptop too far. Some laptops allow you to make further adjustments, but you would do so at your own risk.
Remember that if you choose a higher performance setting, the laptop’s behavior is likely to change. It can reach your fans more often or louder. You may notice that the laptop looks a little bit warmer to the touch. Environmental conditions will also affect you: Running a laptop in its Turbo or High Performance configuration in a cold winter room is likely to produce better results than in the middle of summer, when the room may be warmer.
Laptops can be slow for a variety of reasons, many of which take a while to repair. It’s worth exploring your laptop’s performance settings because they can give you an instant boost with minimal effort. If that doesn’t work, it’s time to look for other solutions.
IDGSome Asus laptops default to Performance with Turbo as an optional configuration.