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How Does Windows Power Management Affect Overclocking?
How much your power settings affect overclock? Let’s find out
3 min. read
Updated onOctober 4, 2023
updated onOctober 4, 2023
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Overclocking can boost your performance, but does Windows Power Management affect overclock? Remember thatCPU overclock can crash gamesand cause other issues.
In this guide, we will find out how and if your power settings affect overclock performance.
How does Windows Power Management work?
Power Management (also known as Power Options on newer models) allows users to adjust how their computer uses power. For example, it will enable you to change the following settings:
What’s overclocking, and should I do it?
Overclocking is when you adjust your hardware’s core frequency and voltage to improve performance. Unfortunately, the process produces extra heat, and if you’re not careful, yourPC won’t turn on due to overheating.
If you decide to overclock your computer, download somestress test softwareto do benchmark tests on your PC and see what your device can handle.
Once you’ve done the benchmark tests, get someoverclocking softwarebecause that’s the easiest way to do it without going into the BIOS firmware.
Does Windows Power Management affect overclocking?
Not really. In our findings, Windows Power Management doesn’t affect overclock, so you won’t get an FPS or a performance boost if we use a High-Performance power plan.
However, using the High-Performance plan will consume more electricity and generate more heat, putting unnecessary strain on your hardware.
You might get some performance improvements using High-Performance mode, but usually, they aren’t noticeable.
Are there any differences?
With the Power Saver plan, the stress test ran at a steady 16 FPS (frames per second), and the GPU ran at around 1030 Mhz, among other things.
With Balanced, we didn’t see any actual performance. The only thing that increased was the internal temperature. After that, it got hotter, and that’s about it.
And the High-Performance plan is the same as before: higher temperatures but no significant changes to GPU or CPU performance.
Unfortunately, we didn’t test the settings in theUltimate power plan, but we expect to see similar results.
Does Windows power plan affect performance?
No, the Windows power plan has minor effects on your performance; if it does, you probably won’t even notice them.
You can only notice a difference when using a laptop for gaming or other intensive tasks.
Looking at these basic tests, it doesn’t appear that a Windows computer’s power plan affects overclocking. However, we would probably see significant changes if we changed the fan limits. To learn more about that, visit ourfan control on Windows 11guide.
We hope that this guide adequately answers your question. Feel free to comment below if you have questions about computer performance.
More about the topics:overclocking,Windows 11
Cesar Cadenas
Networking & Security Specialist
Cesar has been writing for and about technology going on for 6 years when he first started writing tech articles for his university paper. Since then, his passion for technology blossomed into a prosperous writing career. He first started writing about tech in the entertainment world and would later move on to write about smart life tech and social media. He was recently a Technical Writer for tech company Extron where he wrote user guides for audio and video equipment.
He has since moved on to being a freelance writer looking to have a career in copywriting and hopes to share his love and knowledge of technology with the world. Recently, Cesar has written for the cryptocurrency news site, BTCPro and helping people understand tech.
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Cesar Cadenas
Networking & Security Specialist
Cesar is a tech expert passionate about Windows, Microsoft, and anything surrounding the world of PCs.
