Turn on Your Laptop’s Performance Mode for Faster Speed
Laptop manufacturers usually try to find a balance between power, battery life, and heat dissipation for the device’s default settings. However, since everyone uses their laptops differently, your computer’s shipped power settings could potentially reduce its performance when playing games or editing media.
Luckily, you can check and tweak your laptop’s settings to get a small but noticeable performance boost that doesn’t require expensive upgrades or potentially dangerous overclocking. All you have to do is turn on your computer’s performance mode.
PCWorld recently tested the performance modes on a small number of notebooks and found that most of them had speed gains of 10 to 30 percent. It won’t magically turn your potato rig into a powerhouse, but it can boost game frame rates without changing in-game settings, or make media editing and exporting less tedious.
As executive editor Gordon Ma Ung writes:
Take the older version of the MSI Prestige 14 for content creators. Its 10th Gen Core i7-10710U is a low-power chip, so it will never fall victim to it. However, if you change its default setting “Balanced” to “High Performance”, you will see a 10% increase in performance in PCMark 10 overall. In PCMark 10 Digital Content Creation, the High Performance setting gives you an improvement of about 15.5%.
The performance benefits will depend on the task. Give the same MSI Prestige 14 CPU-intensive HandBrake video encoding and switch to high performance in 30 percent less time. This is a nice splash.
How to enable your laptop’s performance mode
Finding and changing laptop performance settings will vary for different manufacturers and models, but most are available through a desktop application. Applications are usually named something like “power settings” or “performance monitor”. Some laptops have hardware switches or keyboard shortcuts for performance presets, such as the Turbo button on some ASUS ROG models. A quick web search can help you find where performance settings are hiding on your system if you don’t know where yours are.
Please note that the specific power settings and presets available to you will also depend on the brand and model of your laptop. Just make sure you pick options that prioritize speed and power over battery saving. You should immediately notice an increase in your laptop’s performance, but again, keep your expectations in check.
Changing your power settings is not the same as overclocking your CPU or GPU. While overclocking can push your desktop beyond the normal hardware limits, it is a dangerous process that can damage your computer or even cause injury due to increased heat generation, especially on laptops.
However, changing your laptop’s performance settings is perfectly safe and each mode is tested by the manufacturer. However, you may notice increased fan noise when using performance mode, and your laptop will likely run hotter (and possibly drain your battery faster). Some laptops also dynamically change performance settings when they are unplugged or when battery life drops below a certain level. These settings can be adjusted on some devices, but it is best to leave your laptop on to avoid interruptions.
If you’re still having problems even with performance mode enabled, make sure your laptop drivers are up to date. This is especially important for GPUs if you are playing games; outdated drivers can cause compatibility issues and slow down your GPU. Likewise, Nvidia and AMD controller apps can help decide the very best gaming settings your machine can handle.
These settings will have less of an impact compared to the performance settings, but each helps a little when you’re trying to optimize your laptop’s speed.