Most people building or buying a PC spend real money on fast RAM, a capable GPU, and a speedy SSD, then never touch the BIOS, let alone change the settings. Then assume everything runs the way it should. It doesn’t. The three settings below actually help a lot if you turn them on.
Your hardware’s real performance is locked behind BIOS settings you’ve never seen
Your PC is capable of much more than you think.
Raise your RAM’s rated speed
You paid for fast memory
When you buy high-speed RAM for a new build or a premium pre-built, it’s easy to assume the memory will just run at the speeds advertised on the box. It won’t. Both pre-built and custom PCs default to slow, conservative speeds out of the box, so you’re missing out on the speed you didn’t even know existed.
There is an industry baseline called JEDEC, a universal standard that motherboard makers use to ensure any combination of parts will boot without issues. The most important thing for any manufacturer is that the system works when you turn it on, because they have a reputation to maintain.
These defaults are safe, but they’re also slow. You should enable XMP in your motherboard’s BIOS. XMP lets RAM manufacturers store pre-tested speed, timing, and voltage settings directly on the memory stick itself.
Your motherboard reads those settings and runs the memory as it was meant to. AMD users will see slightly different names for the same thing. EXPO is the standard for DDR5 on AM5 platforms, while older AM4 boards may show it as DOCP or A-XMP; the idea is the same.
Finding the setting is pretty simple. Restart your PC, then press Delete or F2 repeatedly before Windows loads to enter the BIOS. Most modern motherboards drop you into a simplified EZ Mode first, so hit F7 to get into Advanced Mode where the real options live.
From there, the exact menu name depends on your board. I had to look up what mine was. ASUS calls it AI Tweaker or Extreme Tweaker; MSI uses OC or Extreme Tweaker; Gigabyte puts it under Tweaker or MIT; and ASRock labels it OC Tweaker. Find the XMP, EXPO, DOCP, or A-XMP setting, switch it from Disabled to Enabled or pick Profile 1, then press F10 to save and reboot.
Unlocking full GPU memory access with Resizable BAR
A bandwidth limit could be throttling your graphics card
For decades, PC architecture has dragged along legacy baggage originally designed to keep older 32-bit operating systems happy, and one of the biggest bottlenecks is a 256-megabyte ceiling on how much of your graphics card’s memory your processor can actually see at once.
The way it works is that when your system boots up, your graphics card tells the BIOS how much address space it needs through something called Base Address Registers. Back when 32-bit operating systems ruled, they could only address 4GB of physical memory total, so GPU manufacturers played it safe and capped that window at 256MB. That made sense in 2003. It makes absolutely no sense now.
This gets worse when you’re trying to play a new Triple-A game. Your processor needs to constantly shuttle large textures, geometry, and shader data from storage to your GPU’s VRAM over the PCIe bus, and without Resizable BAR enabled, it can only see a 256MB slice of your GPU’s memory at a time.
So instead of sending one large transfer, it has to break everything into tiny chunks and queue them one after another through the driver stack. There’s no point in deliberately slowing your process. If you have an expensive graphics card sitting there, then you should be able to use it.
Resizable BAR (Smart Access Memory in some places) fixes this by renegotiating those base address registers, so your processor can see your GPU’s entire VRAM pool at once. The OS maps the entire frame buffer into a single contiguous block; transfers become larger and fewer in number, and multiple asset requests can occur simultaneously instead of waiting in line.
You may not have this option unless you have a desktop.
Just the thought of this feels much smarter than what we’ve been doing. I believe the reason is that not everyone has a very expensive GPU, and even the standard ones are not as common. It may get worse as RAM and chips become harder to find due to AI. While it’s sometimes enabled by default, it’s always important to check.
Before you go hunting through your BIOS menus, though, there are a couple of things you need to have in order, because getting this wrong can leave you staring at a black screen on reboot. Resizable BAR needs your system to place memory allocations above the 4GB boundary. That means your Windows boot drive needs to be formatted with GPT, not the older MBR partition scheme. If your drive is already GPT, you’re good. If it’s MBR, you’ll need to sort that out first.
Pushing your CPU past its factory limits with overclocking
Your processor is holding back its true speed
When you’re trying to squeeze every drop of power out of your computer, don’t overlook a setting buried in your BIOS called auto-overclocking. Many systems ship with this disabled or set to a conservative power limit by default. Motherboard manufacturers do this for safety reasons.
Be careful here. A lot of people do this, and it sounds fun and cool, but this can do damage. Make sure your PC can handle something like this.
Manufacturers want your computer to use less electricity and stay quiet right out of the box. However, it’s safe to assume you bought capable cooling hardware for a reason. To get your processor running at the peak clock speeds it’s capable of, you need to enable your platform’s automatic boost profile.
Turn on your computer and repeatedly tap the key to enter your BIOS settings before Windows loads. If you’re on an AMD system, look on the main screen or in the tweaking menu for an option called Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) and switch it from Auto to Enabled. Sometimes it is literally called overclocking.
On Intel, look for Intel Turbo Boost or Multi-Core Enhancement (MCE) and do the same. Hit F10 to save and restart. From that point on, your processor will finally have the green light to use its full power whenever you actually need it.
Be careful, this is still kind of risky
None of these changes is risky if you follow the steps in order, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. If you decide to do any of the above, make sure that you look up the steps for your machine and be very careful. If it offers resistance or acts up, it may not be compatible with your particular device.
- Operating System
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Windows
- CPU
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Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Plus or X2 Elite
Microsoft’s latest Surface Laptop features the Snapdragon X2 Plus and X2 Elite processors. It’s available in 13.8-inch and 15-inch sizes, with up to 64 GB of memory and 2 TB of storage. Available in Platinum, Dune, Black, and the new Jade.