His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path.
Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals.
After a fresh Windows install, PC gamers will immediately rush to the power settings to switch on the "high performance" power plan, which, if nothing else, is harmless. It does what it says on the tin, favoring the highest performance possible in exchange for higher energy usage. The advice has circulated on forums for over a decade, and while for most systems it definitely doesn't hurt to turn on, Ryzen dual-CCD CPUs specifically can actually have their performance hampered by doing so.
Dual-CCD X3D chips need the default setting
Balanced is the way to go to keep games on the right cores
AMD’s dual-CCD X3D processors—the 7900X3D, 7950X3D, 9900X3D, and 9950X3D—split their cores across two chiplets. Only one of them carries the stacked 3D V-Cache that makes these specific chips so strong in games. The other chiplet clocks higher, but has far less L3 cache, so for most games, you want every thread on the cache die because moving between chiplets adds via the Infinity Fabric adds latency.
The processor itself can't tell whether a program is a game, so AMD relies on Windows to do so. The chipset driver uses Game Bar's game detection as the signal to park the cores on the higher frequency chiplet, and with those cores parked, Windows schedules the game on the die with the 3D V-Cache
This is where power plans come into play. AMD recommends keeping systems running a dual-CCD CPU on the "Balanced" power plan, and there's good reason behind that. Owners who kept the High performance habit have reported that core parking doesn’t engage until they switch back, which could cause Windows to schedule the game across both chiplets instead of just the one with the extra cache. The extra latency of having to communicate across the chiplets can cause some significant performance loss.
Modern CPUs don't need Windows to hold their clocks up
They can handle that on their own
Even outside the X3D case, the original reason for High performance has largely disappeared. The plan’s defining traits are that it pins the minimum processor state at 100%, stops cores from parking, and makes Windows quicker to raise clocks, and all of this mattered when the operating system managed CPU frequency directly and a frequency change could take around 30 milliseconds. Holding clocks high was a blunt but pretty effective way to avoid that lag. The thing is: modern CPUs don't need this.
Intel’s Speed Shift, introduced with Skylake, hands frequency control to the CPU and cuts transitions to roughly a millisecond. On the Red Team side of things, CPPC2 arrived for Ryzen in Summer 2019. AMD said it brought clock ramp times down from about 30 ms to 1 to 2 ms, and at that speed, there’s little left for a power plan to fix. Once a game is running, the cores it uses are already boosting. High performance mostly changes what happens when you aren’t gaming: the CPU idles hotter and draws more power, and the fans respond accordingly.
High performance power plans still have a use
And that's why they still exist
If it was totally pointless, the high performance power plan probably wouldn't exist anymore, but some hardware can still leave performance on the table on the Balanced plan. On Intel's hybrid processors like the Alder Lake chips, Windows decides which work goes to P-cores and which goes to E-cores, and the power plan influences that through its scheduling policy. Developer Alois Kraus found that on Windows 10, Balanced’s default policy could push lower-priority work onto E-cores. High performance’s policy favors the faster cores, which would matter for games.
Balanced should be the choice for most people
Even if you're chasing frames
In his investigation, Kraus found that the same effect was far less dramatic on Windows 11, and that's probably due to Intel's Thread Director giving hints as to which cores suit which threads. You also don’t necessarily need the high performance plan to achieve its behavior. Some X3D owners have duplicated the Balanced plan and edited it to mirror high performance, keeping core parking intact and seeing no benchmark difference. Reports conflict on this, though: Hardware Busters found that customizing the plan through the legacy Control Panel broke core parking on its 9950X3D, so I'd just stick with Balanced for the time being.
Power plans are best left at their default settings
Setting your Windows power plan to High performance isn't dangerous, but the one-size-fits-all advice of setting it and forgetting it simply isn't applicable anymore. For most CPUs it is harmless for performance, but for some it's actually detrimental. If you own a dual-CCD X3D chip, check your power plan today. For everyone else, switching back to Balanced will most likely make no difference in games and give you a cooler, quieter idle.