Image: Mark Hachman / IDG
We’ve said it before: There’s one simple trick to increase the performance of your Windows laptop, and it made an enormous difference in Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio 2, which we reviewed today.
It’s not clickbait, or even a paid utility. There’s a hidden turbo button in the Windows 11 settings that can tell your laptop to dial up its performance. The Windows 11 Settings “power mode” is the secret, and we used it to test the Surface Laptop Studio 2. Simply by changing the power mode to “best performance,” we increased the laptop’s performance by 42 percent in just one benchmark.
It’s a huge difference, and not just in numbers. In PCMark 10 alone (a measure of everyday performance, in apps ranging from videoconferencing to spreadsheets, CAD work, photo editing, and more), the increase pushed the Surface Laptop Studio 2 in our review from dead last in our comparison to the top spot — from zero to hero, in other words. We saw less dramatic increases in other benchmarks, but they were still sizeable.
In four key benchmarks, we saw the following performance increases simply by altering the performance slider:
In PCMark, performance increased by 42 percent;In Cinebench R15, a general CPU benchmark, performance increased by 39 percent;In 3DMark (Time Spy), a general 3D graphics benchmark, performance increased by 14 percent;In Handbrake, a transcoding tool, the time to complete the task decreased (improved) by 24 percent.We haven’t yet tested gaming performance, but we could see some increases here, too.
Those are all significant improvements, and all for free. So what’s going on here?
We’ve written about the Windows 11 power mode before. Within the Windows 11 Settings menu, go to System > Power & Battery, then scroll down to the “power mode” button. Here, you should see three power/performance options, capped them off with “Best performance.”
Brad Chacos/IDG
Brad Chacos/IDG
Brad Chacos/IDG
Microsoft, for some reason, ships virtually all if its Surface devices at the lowest settings, which it names “Recommended.” In the real world, Surface laptops tend to run whisper-quiet, with barely any fan noise. While the laptop’s fan will occasionally turn on under heavy load, it won’t always. And performance will suffer as a result.
The reason that the Surface Laptop Studio 2 is about a third of a pound heavier than the original Surface Laptop Studio is because of additional cooling. So Microsoft is adding weight to help keep the Surface Laptop Studio 2 cool and quiet.
That also means that there’s a tradeoff at work here. Dialing up the performance slider dramatically increases the fan noise on the Surface Laptop Studio 2, which not everyone wants, including creatives who are deeply focused on the task at hand.
But what this also means is that you can take advantage of this, too. Adjusting your laptop’s performance slider should improve performance on it, too — just not as much as with the Surface Laptop Studio 2. That’s because rival laptops often ship with the slider already at either the middle or the highest-performance setting to make them look better by comparison.
Still, it’s worth giving it a try, right?
Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor
As PCWorld’s senior editor, Mark focuses on Microsoft news and chip technology, among other beats. He has formerly written for PCMag, BYTE, Slashdot, eWEEK, and ReadWrite.
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